Where are our local governments?

Real leadership cannot emerge from existing assemblies

The debate on local governments (LG) in Pakistan these days misses a key point: what types of functions will these institutions carry out? LG institutions are facing a pincer movement: the dithering over the holding of LG polls has eroded their representative legitimacy, while there has also been a gradual yet blatant takeover of some of the core functions of LGs by provincial governments. What we are seeing right now is the growing municipalisation of provincial governments, which are dabbling in the construction of roads and underpasses in cities, making arrangements for solid waste management as well as regulating building control mechanisms. We have the Sindh Building Control Authority while Punjab is also not lagging behind either with a draft bill on a similar body being established in the province being mulled over at the highest policy level. What we have seen over the years are non-representative federal and provincial bodies taking over cities, whether it is the KDA, the LDA, the QDA or the PDA, or the water boards or sanitation authorities. All these bodies are run by appointees who are not elected representatives. This state of affairs alludes to the tendency of our higher echelons of government preferring to keep control of matters which are essentially of local nature and should fall within the domain of LGs. In the past, LG institutions, till the incumbency of the last PML-N government, enjoyed considerable financial space and were able to raise a vast range of local taxes. I recall that district councils all over Punjab used to have appreciable surpluses on account of provision of export taxes. Likewise, urban local councils had good earnings through octroi despite the drain that electricity bills and expenditures on health and education facilities were on resources. Not only did these taxes help cover important expenditures, the way they were raised and their administration provided a good training ground for the elected leadership and staff of local councils. Later some key taxes were abolished at the behest of donors. Instead, a percentage of the general sales tax collection was set aside for local councils. The new arrangement not only denied these councils the opportunity to develop the capacity and skills to manage their own tax portfolio but also bound them into a dependency relationship as they were now reliant on federal dole. Their autonomy was also curbed. While there were some complaints regarding how local councils collected taxes, instead of removing the bottlenecks, the government readily relented to the donors’ diktat.

Where do we stand today? In Punjab, as mentioned earlier, there are serious attempts to set up a building control authority with the provincial government attempting to take over a key function, which would deny an income base to the local councils in the name of better management of spatial developments. In addition, waste management and even the subject of cattle markets is being taken out of the purview of LGs by setting up companies to look after these domains, which are not answerable to local councils. Their boards of directors are headed by government appointees. The regulation of cattle markets had been an important function of rural councils as well as a significant source of revenue. In major towns of Punjab, with the setting up of parks and horticultural authorities that come under the provincial government, a key source of revenue in the form of income from bill boards and hoardings has already been taken out of the purview of municipal bodies. If this was not enough, under the new law on LGs, district education and health authorities are to be set up whose chiefs shall be appointed by the provincial government. A plain reading of the law does not give us any clue as to the relationship these authorities will have with the local councils.
The issue here is not of service delivery only, but of representative legitimacy which is at stake because of these moves and our legislators are completely indifferent to the consequences of their acts. There may be some income-sharing between these upcoming entities and local councils but that will not resolve the issue at hand, which is about hampering the development of local level leadership and denying it the opportunity to gain valuable experience. The real leadership of this country is not going to emerge through our lacklustre assemblies. It is local level participative institutions that could provide a springboard for the launching of new and authentic leadership in Pakistan. It should be noted that personalities like Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ahmadinejad and Joko Widodo were products of similar local level nurseries. What we require is fostering self-belief in our institutions instead of tinkering with them unnecessarily, which can result in unintended consequences.


Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2015.

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