Follow him on X: @FPWritesThe question of new provinces is back in the news, and it deserves a fair hearing. Large-scale redrawing of the map is uncharted water, thick with moving parts we can only guess at, not measure. There is one tier of government on which we do hold real data, gathered at real scale, more than once. Both, notably, were drawn up under army rule and pushed down from the top rather than argued up from below. The federal government alone counts close to six hundred thousand civil servants set against more than four hundred thousand pensioners already drawing on it, a ratio that worsens by the year.