By Dr Asim Hussain

Governance is now one of the key issue in our society that needs to be addressed on every forum with the higher degree of sincerity and attentiveness. This factor plays a pivotal role in bringing continuous and complete transparency, refinement and impartiality in every single department of both public and private sector organizations in any country including industry, trade, law enforcement, education, judiciary, media and etc.

Governance is all about the right use of power and authority at the right place and right time. An effective system of controlling activities of different nature, making people and institutions accountable on account of negligence, misuse of powers and undue nepotism and discrimination at any place of work. The state is responsible for ensuring extremely fair system of governance that merely to be called as ‘Good Governance’.

The moment any government disdain the importance of the governance and its key elements like proper controlling system, equitable process of accountability, implementation of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) etc at the same time discrepancies, misappropriations and maltreatments starts occurring all around in the society and this happens just because the competent authorities seems to be reluctant to tackle these issue in the most well-defined and a comprehensive manner.

In our country’s political dynamics, the issue of governance is above all. Due to non-implementation of the laid down procedures, corruption and injustices became a dominating norm in our society that has weakened the roots of our country to a great extent.

Yes, surely without beating about the bush, in a nutshell, it can rightly be said that Pakistan at this point of time needs a highly introspective system of good governance that must be inclined towards managing the public administration sector efficiently. Making the system of governance truly effective is the responsibility of both the state and civil society. It is a concerted and shared effort.

The prospective prime minister of the country chairman PTI, Imran Khan has already stressed on the significance of strong system of governance in many of his pre-election speeches as well as the post-election victory discourse. Now, the time has come which says that action speaks louder than words. New prime minister should adapt all those prevalent measures that will certainly ensure the implementation of vivacious system of governance in Pakistan from the grass root level up to the top echelons.

Better governance will attain all its objectives only when the legitimacy at every sector is observed and this could be achieved only when consensus building is refined. Political information requires to be publicized in order to ensure that the system is transparent in all sense and people are aware of all the legislative and administrative activities including policy making.

On the other hand, for making Pakistan such a state where best governance practices are adhered with full conformity, new prime minister must implement the accountability system in letter and spirit at every state institutions and others as well. Individual behavior needs to be controlled mostly in those cases when any person refrain from fulfilling his or her part of job in the appropriate manner or is deliberately distorting the procedure of ethics.

Subsequent to the above, it is equally important that the principle of supremacy of law must be observed by both the government and the citizens. Implementation of Rule of law without any discrimination of cast, color and ethnicity is considered to be the pre-requisite of good governance. In order to attain the goals of good governance system, a vigorous democratic government system is highly important.

It is also pertinent to mention here that the new cabinet members must be equipped with all those capabilities and training that must ensure the evenhanded execution of the governance. As irrefutably, devising of good policies needs good people. In past, our country has suffered the most on account of bad governance at every place of work. The tools of monitoring were all present but were not utilized in the right way that ultimately resulted in complete hit-or-miss and disastrous situation everywhere as the perpetrators were so much self-assured that they will neither be apprehended nor be held accountable in any case. It is appalling that a flimsy institutional structure, proliferating corruption and huge dearth of accountability have seriously bog off our country to an outrageous state of scanty governance.

It is hoped that in near future Pakistan will necessarily make substantial improvements in its governance system that will results in implementation of merit based criteria at every institution and eradication of poverty by eliminating the evil roots of corruption and exploitation from our society. Every state faces predicaments and crisis at different point of times but the system of real governance has all such power that fixes all those quandaries affirmatively and consistently.

–(The writer is the Chairman of Sindh Higher Education Commission (HEC) and former Federal Minister for Petroleum & Natural Resources.)

Governance is all about the right use of power and authority at the right place and right time. An effective system of controlling activities of different nature, making people and institutions accountable on account of negligence, misuse of powers and undue nepotism and discrimination at any place of work.