With the Supreme Court’s decision on the provincial assembly elections, sooner or later Punjab will have polls but a similar concern for the local government system seems to be missing.
The last time local body polls were conducted in Punjab was some 8 years ago, in 2015, and once the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) came into power in the province, local body representatives were sent packing in 2019, which has paralysed the system for 4 years now.
Since then delimitation for the local body elections has been done 4 times and recently the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has announced that it will conduct the polls in April; however, former representatives and candidates wishing to contest are not hopeful at all. In this regard, former chairman of district council Narowal, Ahmad Iqbal, whilst being sceptical of the ECP’s announcement, expressed his displeasure at the inordinate delays in conducting local body polls. “In the last decade, 5 local government laws were made but only 1 election was held. This is a clear violation of the Constitution,” remarked Iqbal, adding that the only election conducted was also at the behest of a Supreme Court order.
Iqbal was of the view that just like the top court had ordered immediate elections for the Punjab Assembly, it could also hold the same for the local body polls. Concurring with Iqbal, Imran Saeed from Union Council (UC) 34, Lahore, who wants to contest elections for vice chairman of the UC, said that if the Supreme Court does not intervene then the people will remain deprived of their fundamental right to have elected representatives at the local level. Being deprived of representation at the third tier of government means that people have to look towards the federal and provincial government to solve all their problems, according to Tariq Bajwa, former nazim from UC-68.
“However, this dependence on the federal and provincial government along with the bureaucracy is misplaced as the MNAs, MPAs, and bureaucrats are not aware of our daily problems,” observed Bajwa. Political analyst, Salman Abid, agrees with Bajwa’s assessment. “Funds which are meant for local representatives are retained by MPAs, who spend them arbitrarily. Consequently, the common man has no say in where money from the public exchequer is spent,” said Abid, adding that this was a gross violation of the Constitution.
“It is high time that the 18th Amendment to the Constitution is respected and power is transferred from provincial representatives to local body representatives.” Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, President of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT), agreeing with Abid, opined that if power was not transferred to the local bodies no work would ever get done at the grassroots level.
“The main reason for this is that provincial and federal representatives barely have any knowledge about the people in their constituencies,” he said, adding that this lack of knowledge is evidenced by the difficulties in distributing aid during the pandemic and the monsoon flooding of last year. “Effective governance can only happen with a functional local government system and for that all political parties need to sit together and fix the system,” suggested Mehboob while talking to The Express Tribune.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 6th, 2023.
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