How to beat Karachi’s bureaucrat at his game

NGO Shehri arms you with laws to extract information.

KARACHI:

Did you pay for charged parking today? Were you asked if you agreed to pay? Did the city government hold a public meeting to ask for objections before issuing the tender? Probably not, because there is, in all likelihood, no law that allows it.

The good news is that NGO Shehri wants to find out what that law is. It has gone to the Sindh ombudsman who has asked the city government to give a response by October 4. Ideally this information should be on the city government’s website.

And so, Shehri’s Dr Syed Raza Ali Gardezi asks: if you don’t know the laws or have the information, how are you going to hold the government accountable? Thankfully, Shehri, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and the Friedrich-Naumann Stiftung have put together everything you need to know to rake that bureaucrat over the coals. (This is part of a comparison with Delhi and Dhaka).

The ‘Study of the Proactive Disclosure of Information by City District Government, Karachi’ was released Saturday. It is a small but powerful booklet that highlights the laws you need to know. Gardezi gave an excellent explanation of the effort, which attracted an audience of law students, labour union leaders, and Defence Housing Authority’s resident’s association representatives.

You can use Article 19-A of the Constitution which says every citizen has the right to access to information on public matters. You can rely on the Federal Freedom of Information (FoI) Ordinance, 2002 and the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority Ordinance, 2002. Here we have the Sindh FoI Ordinance, 2006 and the Sindh Public Procurement Act, 2009. They say that all records should be computerised, all laws be made available and one focal person should be picked in a department to answer any questions. You have a right to see the minutes of council meetings and attend them.



Gardezi said that the city government’s website (which was until recently two-pronged for the KMC and CDGK) is a good one but not one that “empowers” Karachi’s people at the grassroots level. It is missing information on the public’s objections to new taxes, charges and fees. People are not told or asked to object to any amendments to laws. The website doesn’t have minutes of meetings. The Master Plan department is barely there. No policy papers, laws and rules or by-laws are on the website either. It also needs to be in Sindhi and Urdu.

When the team talked to the Jamshed town administrator, they found that the changes to local government laws had everyone confused. They were changed twice in 2012 and twice in 2013. The latest Sindh Local Government Act 2013 isn’t even a law because it hasn’t been gazetted. But it also includes FoI rules that say the government has to make all records public (Sections 150 and 154).

If any bureaucrat tells you that their department doesn’t come under the FoI act, you can quote Sindh Peoples Local Government Ord 2012 Chapter I, Section 3 that says it overrides all other laws. Gardezi explained that it doesn’t matter what local government law applies -  the umbrella Sindh FoI law or even the federal laws cover these areas automatically.

Contact Shehri ([e-mail]) for the booklet which will soon be online. You can’t have good governance behind closed doors. As US Supreme Court judge Louis Brandeis once said: Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 15^th, 2013.