Editorial
Watch any parliamentary debate and you will quickly judge who has done their homework and who has not. Preparation shows. Competence shows. But parliament is only half the picture. The real test of governance happens behind closed doors, in cabinet rooms where federal and provincial decisions actually take shape. If those proceedings were ever broadcast live, the public would see a truth far starker than anything parliament reveals. The case for televising cabinet meetings is no longer academic. It is urgent.
Consider how a cabinet agenda is actually built in Pakistan. Bureaucracy writes it. The cabinet secretary manages the meeting, drafts the agenda, and steers the entire decision-making process from start to finish. Most ministers never read the relevant files in depth. Most are unprepared to argue complex policy on their feet. A minister will defend his own department by echoing whatever his secretary has briefed him to say, then fall silent the moment another ministry’s business comes up. Silence, not scrutiny, defines the room.
The consequence is predictable. Instead of becoming a forum for collective wisdom and collective responsibility, the cabinet too often functions as a rubber stamp. The prime minister or chief minister appears to preside, appears to command the room. But look closer. The agenda was written elsewhere. The policy framework was shaped elsewhere. Elected representatives, the people voters actually chose, end up ratifying decisions rather than making them.
This is the real governance crisis in Pakistan, and it will not fix itself. Genuine collective responsibility, the kind every governance textbook demands of a cabinet, cannot exist while ministers remain institutionally, intellectually, and technically outmatched by the bureaucrats briefing them. Until that capacity gap closes, governance cannot improve. Legislation cannot improve. Ask yourself: can a system call itself democratic when its most consequential decisions are made by unelected hands and merely signed by elected ones? Pakistan needs an answer, and it needs the cameras rolling to find one.
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