"You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

I could not resist borrowing this phrase from the Canadian PM Mark Carney's scintillating speech at Davos, when wondering if the fledgling federation of Pakistan also currently lives within a lie. Evidently, multiple policy paradoxes and expediency are weighing down this arrangement. Given the plethora of noises from out of Peshawar, Quetta and at times Karachi, the edifice of the federation is creaking and crying for an urgent course correction.

The 18th Constitutional Amendment (2010) was meant to be such a course-correcting tool for the reset. Fifteen years on, Pakistan is trapped between constitutional promise and political practice. Persistent complaints from provinces, particularly Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Balochistan, raise a fundamental question: does Pakistan need a new social contract to make its federation workable, or does it simply need to honour the one it already has?

The 18th Amendment abolished the Concurrent List and transferred 47 subjects exclusively to provinces. Article 160 introduced a fiscal "floor", ensuring that the federal government can never reduce a province's share in the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award below the existing level (currently 57.5%). Third, Article 172(3) granted provinces joint and equal ownership of oil and gas discovered within their territories, ending decades of near-total federal control.

Yet today, the NFC Award remains the most visible arena of federal-provincial conflict. While the 7th NFC Award (2010) increased provincial shares and introduced criteria beyond........

© The Express Tribune