RAWALPINDI, Aug 9: It is election time in the city and the candidates running for the local government offices are out promising the stars to the voters. But perhaps what the hapless citizens need and want most are decent roads.

“What we suffer daily, those in the race would experience when they hit the campaign trail and manoeuvre through the pot-holed, filth strewn and muddy streets,” one irate citizen in Satellite Town said.

But would they? So far the election activity has been static - the candidates or their agents sitting under ‘shamianas’ pitched at street corners.

Even if they become active, what the electorate should expect from them?

The present woeful conditions of the roads in the city speak volumes for the interest the outgoing elected representatives, including nazims and other officials of local government, took in providing basic civic services for the citizens.

“They (the city fathers) might have done countless things to please the chief citizen, President Gen Pervez Musharraf, but the roads stand as an infallible evidence of their poor performance as far as the common citizens go,” said a citizen.

On several occasions during their four-year rule the president had directed the local governments to provide facilities to the people. “May be his words did not mean to refer to roads. If they were, Pindiites would not have been suffering like this,” said the citizen.

There was no shortage of plans to build and improve various link roads or streets that the local authorities announced to undertake. But concrete strewn on some roads and choked drains are the only signs of their implementation.

Hardly any of the city’s myriad problems — broken roads, overflowing drains, scarcity of drinking water, violation of building rules, commercialization of residential plots — had been solved by the previous public representatives.

Are the citizens of Rawalpindi going to be unlucky this time too?