Opposition to what: Fearing bureaucrats, PTI rejects LB draft bill for capital

Most of Asad Umar’s proposals had have been incorporated in the draft.

ISLAMABAD: The party controlling half of Islamabad’s National Assembly seats has rejected the proposed local government bill for the capital proposed by the ruling party, which also controls the other half of the city’s seats.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has rejected the draft local government bill for Islamabad, under which the urban areas of the city would be made into a metropolitan corporation. The government moved the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) Local Government Bill 2013 in the National Assembly last week.

“This bill is mere eyewash designed to control the local governments through an obedient bureaucracy, depriving the people of Islamabad from the fruits of a genuinely-empowered local government system,” said Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Adnan Randhawa.

Chairing a meeting of party’s workers in Islamabad, he said that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government’s draft bill for local bodies in Islamabad was deliberated upon in detail and was rejected by their party members from different sectors and union councils of Islamabad.

Among the specific objections cited by Randhawa was the formation of a local government commission consisting of bureaucrats, which he said would have the power to sack the elected mayor and other leaders, thus giving control over elected leaders to nominated people.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who tabled the bill, said that it will empower the government to specify areas within ICT as union councils for the metropolitan corporation.

Oddly, PTI leader Asad Umar, the MNA for NA-48 Islamabad, wanted to see a strong bill under which a union council will elect a chairman and vice chairman as joint candidates, six general members, two women, one peasant or worker, one youth member and one non-Muslim member. His suggestion is identical to the bill’s proposed set up for a union council.

In his an interview with The Express Tribune, he gave his vision about LG polls in ICT where the metropolitan corporation shall consist of a mayor and deputy mayor as joint candidates with members as chairmen of union councils, also identical to the proposal in the draft bill.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 16^th, 2013