A SUPREME COURT ruling on Friday has cleared the way for the federal government to appoint scores of “heads of statutory bodies, autonomous bodies, semi-autonomous bodies, regulatory bodies, etc”.

The ruling has denied the government the excuse that permanent appointments had been delayed because the Supreme Court under then chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry during the caretaker government last year had made appointments that much more difficult, even in contravention of the existing law.

Know more: SC revisits appointments case judgment

Where the former chief justice had required the formation of a commission to oversee statutory appointments, the present Supreme Court has ruled that where the law requires appointments through a certain, specified process, that process should hold sway. But the court has also given the government till Dec 10 to make the required appointments — essentially keeping the pressure on the government while denying it the continuing excuse that inaction is a result of differences between what the rules state and what the Supreme Court had required.

A closer look at governmental inaction when it comes to high-level appointments to public-sector enterprises and regulatory bodies in particular would suggest a very different cause to what the PML-N has claimed publicly: it simply has not been a priority of the government.

Perhaps the true cause for inaction is over-centralisation, with the prime minister and his team simply overburdened by holding too many administrative responsibilities simultaneously. Or perhaps good governance does not really feature on the rulers’ list of priorities because the focus is more on privatisation and selling off loss-making, even profit-making, organisations and ensuring they are able to operate in the private sector with the minimal of regulatory interference.

Neither answer is good for the public interest; nor should the government be allowed to forcefully push that course.

The fact of the matter is that whether firms are operated by the public sector or the private sector, the public interest is served by ensuring competition and transparency.

Similarly, for public-sector enterprises, whether they are turned around to achieve a higher selling price or for the sake of stemming loss of public money, the people’s interest demands competitive, meritorious and qualified management of those firms.

A senior management that is installed on an ad hoc or temporary basis — and possibly on nepotistic or cronyism grounds — does not meet the demands of the public interest. The government can do better, and now there is no reason for it not to do so by Dec 10.

Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2014