Local govt reforms in Pakistan

The federal and provincial governments are actively planning either to scrap the existing structure of Local Government or modify it to meet their requirements. For the modernisation of the system, Asian Development Bank has provided about $300 million for improving local representation, evolving a system of transparent accountability and bringing efficiency in the delivery of civic services to the people.

The fact of the matter is that the local government system grows through a process of evolution in accordance with the political, socio-anthropological, ethnic and cultural conditions of a country. Ayub introduced Basic Democracies System in 1959, making 80000 democrats as electoral college for the election of the President. From 1972 to 1977, the PPP did not hold local body elections Zia constituted "Majlas-e-Shoras" at the federal and provincial levels but delegated powers to elected representatives in local councils to prolong his ruthless rule.

Later, General Musharraf made drastic changes by changing the entire structure of the District administration by promulgating the Local Government Ordinance, 2001. Gen Naqvi and his team had no insight or practical experience of the district administration or of local government. They destroyed nearly 150 years old system. For the first time in the history of Pakistan, constitutional protection was given to the system under Article 140-A of the Constitution.

It is pertinent to note that martial law regimes were not sincere in their pursuits, their only aim being to create an army of loyalists from village to the city levels to perpetuate their unconstitutional and illegal rules.

The cardinal principle of Local Government, all over the world, is that local representatives must exercise powers within the framework of local charters framed with the participation of local communities or laws passed by the elected representatives of the people. Ironically none of the above pre-requisites was followed in 2001. The administrative structure of civil & police administration that had grown administratively, politically and sociologically over a period of more than 100 years was scraped with one stroke of a pen. The ex-President was very proudly acclaiming as one of his big achievements at the national & international forums, that he had empowered the people and delegated them sufficient administrative and financial powers to provide security and civic amenities to the people at the grassroots level. The new system was not pre-tested in any district or province before introducing it all over the country. In four martial laws, it was persistently advocated that elected representatives were corrupt and inefficient. On the contrary the politicians in the form of nazims were made mini dictators without any transparent system of accountability. Unfortunately no reliable and objective study was conducted to evaluate the performance of local councils and their nazims. But stories of corruption, inefficiency and plundering of the resources of local governments appeared in the media from time to time. Provincial Local Government Commissions constituted under Clause 131 of the said Ordinance neither performed special inspections, monitoring, special audit, and enquiries nor took cognisance of the violation of laws & rules.

The ministers for local governments were the ex-officio chairmen of the Commissions and it was not in their political interest to lay hand on their staunch supporters. Out of 35 Districts of Punjab, 33 nazims were de-facto allies of PML(Q) League. Obviously ruling Q-League's patronisation of provincial governments and absolute protection of Pervez Musharraf made them very strong. In fact these councillors & nazims were the backbone for the survival of Musharraf as they were to provide unflinching support to him and "Q-League" at the time of general elections. In the beginning of this year, "London Economist" in one of its publications had highlighted that millions of dollars were misused by the nazims in providing electoral support to the PML(Q) candidates in the last election. Nearly 100 of these candidates were close relatives of nazims. It may be of some interest to the readers that the ADP funds of the provincial governments to the tune of billion of rupees were transferred to Local Councils. Barring few exceptions, no commendable improvement is visible in the standard of basic civic amenities in the urban or rural areas.