On August 12, 2026, Balochistan Governor Sheikh Jaffar Khan Mandokhail represented Pakistan at the UN’s Youth and AI Summit in New York, held on International Youth Day.
He spoke well, calling for inclusive, ethical AI and citing Pakistan’s target to train 1 million AI professionals by 2030. Fine remarks, delivered competently. But the choice of messenger raises a fair question or two.
Why send a 70 year-old provincial Governor, in politics since 1990, to a summit built entirely around youth voice? Was this really about substance, or simply about protocol, sending whoever outranks everyone else in the room, rather than whoever actually lives and breathes the subject? Did any young Pakistani technologist or AI professional get a real seat at that table, even informally, while the Governor held the official one? And what does that choice say about how seriously youth representation is actually taken, versus how easily it gets treated as a box to check off a press release?
The Governor’s words about empowering young people to shape the future landed a little strangely coming from someone who has outlasted six party changes and multiple decades in provincial office, long before most people in that room were even born.
So when will we prioritise experts in their relevant fields as key representatives rather than filing in with appeasing allies political parties and their cronies?
