Imran Khan speaks during a budget session in the National Assembly in Islamabad. File

Tariq Butt, Correspondent

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan says his government has to take its governance performance to much higher levels in the remaining time of its five-year tenure and told his ministers that the time for performance has arrived.

He was addressing a special ceremony to sign performance agreements of the federal government for the Year 2020-21 attended by ministers and special assistants. The federal ministers signed performance agreements with the premier.

"We will put pressure on ourselves to take our governance performance to much higher levels in our remaining two-and-a-quarter years," Imran said. "We no longer have an excuse that we're new and are learning because most of us came into power for the first time. The time for performance has arrived.”

The prime minister termed the signing of performance agreements a step in the right direction, and said the performance of each ministry will be evaluated based on the contracts and every ministry will put pressure on itself to meet its targets.

"After all, the public has to decide after five years whether we made their lives better or not; whether we fulfilled the promises made to them or not," he said, stressing that governance could not be delivered unless all ministries performed individually.

Noting that presidents and prime ministers in the United States and United Kingdom were given detailed briefings about all government departments before they took office, Imran said he virtually had no time to prepare before assuming office and the first three months were spent understanding the state of affairs. He said the system should be tweaked so the incoming government was briefed and given time to prepare for governance before it started functioning formally.

He said the devolution of power following the 18th Amendment had also created governance problems that needed to be rectified. Citing an example, he said food security fell within the federal government's domain but all the power had been delegated to provinces, with the effect that if one province refused to follow the Centre and devised its own policy, the resulting price differential of commodities like wheat distorted prices across the country.