Nadeem-ul-Haque
Development doesn’t happen where governments spend money. It happens where people, firms, and ideas are free to interact. Nigerian multiplication of states prevented local city government development.
Every few years, Pakistan’s decentralization debate wakes up, stretches, and asks the same tired question: should we create more provinces? Divide Punjab. Split Sindh. Somewhere in this arithmetic, development is supposed to follow.
Nigeria gets dragged into the argument almost on cue. Look, the proponents say—240 million people, thirty-six states. We have four provinces for a fraction of that population and much less state capacity to show for it. The comparison sounds persuasive until you look past the headline number.
Nigeria is not simply a country with many provinces. It has three constitutionally recognized tiers of government: the federation, thirty-six states, and 774 local government areas. The states are not local governments. They are intermediate governments—a middle layer between Abuja and the institutions that are supposed to actually touch citizens’ lives. Pakistan’s debate keeps borrowing Nigeria’s middle tier and forgetting its third one exists. That’s not a small omission. It’s the whole story.
So here’s the question nobody in Islamabad wants to sit with: if we carved out ten or twelve provinces tomorrow, would the government actually get closer to citizens, or would we just end up with more governors, more assemblies, more secretariats, and another layer of people stamping files? Because Nigeria already ran this experiment, and it should make anyone citing the country nervous rather than confident.
Creating thirty-six states didn’t decentralize power in Nigeria. It just moved the center—from Abuja to thirty-six state capitals. For years, federal money meant for the 774 councils passed through something called the State Joint Local Government Account, and governors used it exactly the way you’d expect: controlling deductions, controlling timing, and controlling who got paid and when. Elected councils were routinely swapped out for caretaker committees loyal to the governor. On paper, the third tier existed. In practice, it was a branch office with a nameplate.
Governors had a defense, and it wasn’t a stupid one. Many councils, they argued, couldn’t run payroll on their own. Pooling resources kept the weak ones solvent. Fair enough—except critics pointed out the obvious trap in that logic: councils can’t build administrative capacity while the state keeps a hand on their money, their staff, and their politics. Round and round it goes. Sound familiar? It should. Pakistani cities have been having a version of this fight with their provinces for decades, just without the vocabulary to name it.
In July 2024, Nigeria’s Supreme Court finally weighed in. States, it ruled, could no longer hold and spend the councils’ federal allocations. The money had to go directly to democratically elected local governments, and the caretaker-committee trick was thrown out too—a local government had to actually be elected, not appointed from a state capital and given a badge.
Two years later, the ruling is still mostly theoretical. Reporting through mid-2026 shows the bulk of quarterly allocations—more than a trillion naira in the first quarter of 2026 alone—still flowing through state-controlled channels, not directly to councils. President Tinubu has leaned on governors publicly and even floated an executive order to force the Central Bank’s hand. Governors have mostly just waited him out. Anambra State passed legislation in 2024 that critics say quietly rebuilt the old joint-account system under a different label. And with 2027 elections approaching, nobody in the federal government wants to pick this fight too hard, too fast.
Which points to the real lesson, and it isn’t about compliance timelines. A court can reassign legal authority overnight. A political system cannot reassign actual power nearly so fast. Even where the money now technically lands in a council’s account, the state still runs local elections, controls personnel, writes the relevant laws, and manages the administrative machinery underneath it all. Depositing a check doesn’t make a government autonomous if everything else about it still answers upward.
This is almost exactly the trap waiting for Pakistan. Split Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa into ten or twenty provinces tomorrow, leave the existing provincial model untouched, and what have you actually built? Several smaller Lahores, each dominating its own hinterland the way Lahore dominates Punjab today. The map changes. The politics of centralization doesn’t. You’d have decentralized centralization—a phrase that should embarrass anyone who says it out loud, and yet.
There’s a reason this pattern reproduces itself so faithfully, and it isn’t really about geography. It’s about the bureaucracy that would staff each new provincial capital. Nigeria’s own federal civil service is, like Pakistan’s, a colonial inheritance built to run a large territory from the center — hierarchical, politically captured, more instrument of the ruling class than neutral administrator of it. And crucially, that pathology didn’t stay in Abuja when power moved to the states. Nigeria’s thirty-six state bureaucracies largely reproduced the same fusion of politician and civil servant at their own scale, just with smaller budgets and shorter supply lines to the governor’s office. Pakistan’s own CSS-dominated administrative culture — postings, transfers, and patronage run out of the chief secretary’s office—would not stay behind in Lahore, Karachi, or Peshawar if new provincial capitals were created. It would simply relocate, fully intact, to Multan, Sukkur, or wherever the next secretariat gets built. New provinces don’t dilute an entrenched bureaucracy. They franchise it.
Pakistan, to be clear, hasn’t even reached this stage of the conversation. Every constitutional fight here is still about the NFC Award, provincial shares, or the demand for a new province. Local government shows up right before elections are constitutionally overdue, gets a headline or two, and then vanishes. Cities and districts remain what they’ve always been—administrative appendages of provincial departments, not governments in their own right.
That’s a problem, because development doesn’t happen at the provincial level anymore, if it ever did. It happens in cities. Land markets, zoning, transport, commercial regulation, and policing—these are local questions dressed up as provincial ones. Firms invest in Karachi, not Sindh. Entrepreneurs compare Lahore to Bengaluru or Dubai, not to Multan. And yet nearly every decision that shapes those cities gets made in a provincial secretariat, by people who don’t live there and won’t answer for the outcome.
Nigeria’s unfinished mess offers Pakistan both a warning and a working principle, not a template to copy. The warning: adding intermediate governments doesn’t decentralize anything by itself—it can just relocate where the center sits. The principle: decentralization that stops at the province isn’t decentralization at all. It’s a change of address. Real reform means deciding, constitutionally, what belongs to the local level and cannot be touched by the province above it—not just money, but elections, staffing, land, planning, and regulation.
None of this is free, either. Every new province means a governor, a cabinet, a secretariat, a police command—resources that could have gone to roads or schools, and fresh patronage to hand out besides.
So the question Pakistan should be asking isn’t how many provinces we need. It’s where decisions actually ought to be made and how much room our cities have to run themselves. Development doesn’t happen where governments spend money. It happens where people, firms, and ideas are free to interact. Nigeria didn’t learn that by creating states. Two tiers down, it’s still trying to.
