A search is on for the new chief, but no one seems to care. Unlike searches for the chief justice and the chief of army staff, the search for the Planning Commission’s chief economist, and for several other leadership positions, lingers while Pakistan’s premier planning body continues to plan without planners.

Pakistan’s Planning Commission has been without a chief economist since 2011 when Dr Jaffer Qamar abruptly resigned. Given the herculean task of reviving Pakistan’s economy after a disastrous decade, the Planning Commission jobs are not for the faint hearted. Exceptionally talented and intrepid civil servants are needed for these roles instead of the slick careerists who know their way around the P Block of the Cabinet Secretariat.

The sorry state of the nation’s economy allows one to conclude that as of late the Planning Commission has hardly proven its worth to the taxpayers. The government’s intervention in the functioning of the Commission has prevented it from acting as the nation’s think tank. Instead, the commission provided cover to whatever plans were fed by the past civil and military governments. Drastic changes are needed in the commission’s mandate, structure and constitution for it to be able to serve as the nation’s premier planning body.

The Planning Commission of Pakistan is responsible for developing and approving plans for socio-economic development. It also approves of and assists in borrowing decisions resulting in billions of dollars of foreign and domestic debt. While the masses have been critical of the IMF for the billions of dollars Pakistan owes to international lenders, they seldom question the competency of those at the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance who negotiate and sign on these instruments of debt.

In the past, the commission has done a poor job of staffing leadership positions. Often, those who have retired from lucrative careers elsewhere, end up taking leadership roles at the commission, which has effectively operated as a male geriatric ward rather than an innovative and vibrant place where the youth and the youthful experiment with new ideas while they devise policies for development and prosperity.

The government recently has reduced the experience requirement from 25 to 15 years for the vacant positions at the commission. This is a step in the right direction. The earlier requirement for a doctorate and 25 years of experience resulted in the hiring of those who graduated from universities before the internet changed the way we think and operate. The not-so-relevant, yet experienced, hires had essentially little to contribute, just like their predecessors who held these positions in the past.

Some have argued that lower threshold for experience is designed to induct less than qualified individuals who will not stand in the way of the government’s whimsical decision-making. Such concerns are unwarranted and by default prejudicial against the new breed of young Pakistanis who are eager to lead the nation with new ideas. But more importantly, I would ask the former ‘experienced’ members of the commission if they had themselves stood in the way of poor decision-making of the past governments. It was not very long ago that Pervez Musharraf wanted to operate a public transit system in Karachi using magnetically levitated trains; an unproven and most expensive mode of public transit that boasts few functional prototypes globally. If the experienced members had objected to the plans, which I highly doubt, they are at liberty now to release their dissenting notes.

Why is it that our elders teach us Iqbal’s poetry, but hastily skip over the couplets where Iqbal wrote:

A bigger challenge though is the lack of skilled professionals left in Pakistan to assume leadership roles. The reverse brain drain, which helped India and Bangladesh with the much needed human capital, has not transpired for Pakistan. Take India for example where the likes of Professor Kaushik Basu returned in 2009 to assist with economic planning. Professor Basu, currently serving as the World Bank’s chief economist, is the author of several best sellers on economic thought including my favourite: Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics. Or what about Professor Raghuram Rajan, the author of best sellers, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists and Fault lines, who returned in 2013 to serve as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Professor Rajan taught at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago before he served as the Chief Economist at the IMF. Also, did I mention Raghuram Rajan is only 50 years old!

Pakistan cannot claim as its own any thinkers whose books (or writings) on economics are global bestsellers. Those who are vying for these roles, and are actively lobbying for them, are career bureaucrats who view these jobs in the narrow context of entitlement. They are neither fluent in the global discourse in development economics nor are they capable of steering the nation’s economy out of the turmoil where markets have failed and rent-seeking has emerged as the new shared value.

To make matters worse, Pakistan has priced itself out of global talent. The salary reserved for these positions in the MP-1 scale maxes out at 578,000 Rupees (US$5,500) per month. This salary, however, is less than even what a freshly minted assistant professor of economics nets at a decent university. Seasoned professionals and academics earn significantly higher than US$10,000 per month. This requires the government to use creative solutions to attract talent from abroad. Ahsan Iqbal, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, earlier in November revealed that the government has partnered with the private sector so that it can pay the top-up for professional salaries to bring them in line with international salaries.

Finding private funds to top-up government-sanctioned salaries is innovative and a step in the right direction. However, it’s not the money that matters to those who’d like to help. It is the operational freedom of a research laboratory that many professionals are used to and what they’d like to have if they were to work for the commission. If in return the commission only offers relatively lower salaries and a rules-infested mediocre work environment, the commission may have little success in reversing the brain drain and may have to rely on drained brains instead.

The commission needs fearless, and not just pious, civil servants. These bureaucrats need to stand in the way of politicians’ unwelcome advances in policy making. They have to offer sound and cogent advice while running the risk of an adverse reception from the government. Individuals such as Dr Waqar Masood Khan, the Federal Secretary for Finance, do not fit the bill. Dr Khan recently wrote a new chapter in bureaucratic complacency when he appeared on a television program and defended Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s decision to appoint his own daughter to lead the Youth Business Loan program.

Any self-respecting professional would have resigned in protest at such a blatant exercise in nepotism. Dr Munir Sheikh, Canada’s former chief statistician, wasted no time in resigning from the coveted position when he saw the government acting against the long-term interests of Canadians.

What Pakistan needs is skilled men and women of character who would put principles before profit, country before career, and others’ needs before self-interest while they make crucial decisions about what type of power plants to build, what industries to receive incentives, and where new infrastructure should be built.

• This was the first of two parts on planning in Pakistan. The second part will focus on how the Planning Commission should be structured for planning in the 21st century.