Let’s say Pakistan does it. Let’s say the maps get redrawn, new provinces are carved out, new capitals get their respective assemblies. What then? Nothing, probably. Not right away, and maybe not ever.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth the current debate keeps skating past: a new province is just a smaller version of the old problem, unless something changes underneath it first. And that something is local government. Local government is the very tier every province in this country has quietly strangled for years.
Think about what actually happens when a province is created. A new secretariat opens. A new chief minister’s house gets built. A new bureaucracy settles in, with its own budget, its own discretion, and (if history is any guide) its own appetite for holding onto both. Nothing in that process guarantees the money reaches a village council any faster than it does today. If anything, it adds another layer between the citizen and the cheque.
Pakistan already ran this experiment, sort of. The 18th Amendment devolved enormous power from the centre to the provinces in 2010. Health, education, huge chunks of policy- all pushed down a level, exactly as reformers wanted. And what did the provinces do with that power? Mostly, they kept it. Local governments were supposed to be the next stop. Instead, they became an afterthought that got dissolved, delayed, or simply left unfunded while provincial capitals absorbed the gains for themselves.
That’s not a guess. It’s the pattern. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s local councils sat without an election date for months. Punjab has not had functioning local government since 2019. Islamabad has now rescheduled its local elections, maybe for the fourth time.
Meanwhile, provinces collectively sit on a fiscal surplus while the federal government drowns in a Rs 6501 billion deficit. The money exists. It just stops moving one level before it reaches the people who need it.
So why would carving out new provinces fix anything, when the provinces we already have have not finished failing to devolve power downward?
This is the sequencing argument nobody in the country seems willing to make, because it’s less dramatic than announcing a new province on television or posting on social media. But it’s the correct one. New administrative units are not, in themselves, a bad idea. Smaller units genuinely can bring government closer to people, and there’s a real case for them once the basics are working. The mistake is treating them as a shortcut past devolution rather than a step that comes after it.
Do it the other way around, and you get eighteen provinces instead of four. Each one a slightly smaller version of the same hoarding instinct, just with a shorter commute to the secretariat.
The fix, unglamorous as it is, starts with Article 140-A. Local governments need guaranteed elections on a fixed constitutional timetable, not one that provincial assemblies get to indefinitely postpone. They need a locked-in share of provincial transfers, not a discretionary one handed out based on political loyalty. And they need real authority over the budgets they are given, not just implementation duties for decisions made above them.
Only once that’s built, once a union council in Sukkur or a district government in Turbat can actually raise money, spend it, and answer for it, does the conversation about new provinces or administrative units become worth having. Build the house on that foundation, and new provinces might genuinely help. Build it on the same hollow ground, and we will be back here in a decade, arguing about redrawing the map all over again.
