GIVEN the circumstances it has been drawn up under, it is difficult to gauge the targets and intentions of the Balochistan budget.

The finance secretary is languishing in jail so it is not clear who exactly worked on drawing up the projections and targets in the document.

The announcement was also chaotic, suffering from a delay, and the documents have not been prepared beyond a budget in brief and the Annual Development Programme.

At the time of writing, neither has been uploaded to the website as is standard practice. Beyond the circumstances of its drafting, the budget suffers from large unaccounted allocations, such as 27pc of the ADP being allocated under a head titled ‘other’.

Any attempt to discuss the budget and its targets seriously is hampered by these limitations. Balochistan is the one province in the country in the most dire need of governance, given the magnitude of the challenges it is facing.

Although there is no shortage of talented and well-meaning individuals in the province, the trick is to find a way to put them in a position where they can make a difference. Without this, we will have a continuation of the status quo, where funds disappear into disbursement heads with little to no monitoring or oversight.

The funds found in the house of the finance secretary, for which he was arrested, were supposedly from local government allocations. In addition, security-related allocations also disappear into a black hole, never to be heard of again.

The ADP contains massive throw forwards that are the result of poor monitoring of development funds, and schemes run by members of the provincial assembly also eat up large amounts of money with no oversight. Mired in multiple conflicts, Balochistan is controlled by a self-serving tribal elite, where the security forces call most of the shots.

This creates a serious problem of what, in financial circles, is termed ‘moral hazard’ — a situation in which the consequences of one person’s actions are borne by another, thereby warping the incentive structure in a way to prevent any self-correction.

In that sense, the provincial budget and its myriad dysfunctions reflect all that ails Balochistan. For matters in the province to improve, the self-correction of democracy must be allowed to function since there is no force more powerful than this in the sphere of politics.

Only after that can we talk of fixing economic issues.

Published in Dawn, June 21th, 2016