On partisan grounds

Published November 10, 2013

RECENT academic research by Zahid Hasnain, Ali Cheema, and others, on local development spending in Pakistan shows that outlays made by politicians are hardly ever needs-based and almost al-ways patronage-driven with the explicit view to securing electoral blocs for re-election.

It goes without saying that a country facing a whole host of development challenges — many which need to be resolved through local political processes — can’t really afford such crass patronage politics.

The good thing is that all four provincial governments, by passing legislation of varying quality, have shown some intent of holding local government elections in the next few months.

The only issue left, and one closely linked to distortionary development spending, is whether the Punjab government will comply with court orders and amend Section 18 of its existing act to ensure polls on a political party basis.

The PPP, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), the PML-Q, and a group of civil society actors had taken the government to court on the premise that non-party polls are undemocratic. They have a point here, which the Lahore High Court has very recently upheld.

But more than the polemics and the sloganeering of democracy versus Sharif- ocracy, there is also a very strong development-related argument to be made in favour of party-based polls.

Part of the reason why Pakistan has seen such an entrenchment of patronage-based politics — one that is so obviously distortionary in its development outlay — is because political parties, as organisations, are weaker than individual candidates at the bottom tier.

It is also why dictators, or dictator-propped parties, with vague, or non-existent grass-roots level entrenchment — think PML-Q in 2002 — prefer that candidates prove their mettle by winning in non-party polls. It saves them the hassle of deciding who rides their ticket, and it allows them to carve out majorities of their own liking in district councils.

The counterpoint, ie the benefit to democracy of party-based local government elections, is that they help in strengthening political parties as coherent, hierarchical institutions — which they currently aren’t.

This basically means that while the electorate can identify personalities at the top, and in some cases, in the middle of each party, the general connection with, and recognition of, locality-specific office-bearers is non-existent.

Sure, people know who functions as an election-time ‘tout’ for which party, but there’s a persistent information gap in terms of who to go to for issue-based representation, or for the purpose of lobbying after a general election.

By having fixed, designated office-bearers, holding political office — councillor, naib-nazim, nazim — at the lowest tier, political parties will be opening themselves up to a much wider, and much more frequent engagement with the electorate.

Following from that and the larger point of addressing development challenges through politics, weak party organisation at the local tier — both a cause and result of non-party based polls — encourages politicians to engage in flashy, strategic spending that doesn’t really address core development problems.

For instance, in a non-party election, aspirants would like voters, especially those who can influence other voters, to see and hear about the tangible work they’ve done.

In other words, re-soling a street in otherwise usable condition, repairing the boundary wall of a school actually suffering from teacher absence, or influencing public-sector employee recruitment, take precedence over improving teacher attendance rates, increasing child enrolment, or ensuring presence of medical staff at a local Basic Health Unit.

This is largely because local spending isn’t linked to any larger party programme or manifesto that the provincial or federal government might wish to implement, and subsequently take credit for.

What’s confusing (and I guess at one level, telling) is that this preference of local mohalla kingpins exists despite the PML-N repeatedly stressing its commitment to improving the state of social sector service delivery in Punjab.

The party leadership holds forth on tackling issues plaguing primary and secondary education, and basic health, in the province, and has formed many a ‘strategic’ partnership with DFID, the World Bank, and other development partners.

What they seem to miss, through default or design, is that their entire agenda of implementation hinges on a creaking, heavily compromised provincial bureaucracy coupled with ad hoc, executive-ordered measures of accountability.

There’s no political ownership of these initiatives at the local level, no source of social accountability, and almost no input from the people at the receiving end of delivery failures.

In fact, any lessons learnt (if at all) from the process of making MPAs publicly responsible for dengue eradication in their constituencies two years ago seem to have been discarded or ignored in the design of this new local government system.

The 2013 general elections saw a sharp, albeit still small, rise in the importance of ‘party brand and message’ over individual candidate performance. It explains why many patronage politicians lost National Assembly seats, and why the PML-N was able to secure a larger-than-expected haul.

Bringing that recognition and messaging down to the local level will encourage politicians to actively compete for party tickets.

In the presence of a choice of candidates, parties will discard those candidates that are less successful in implementing initiatives taken by the provincial government, or those who cause harm to the party image by engaging in targeted, wasteful expenditure.

While, admittedly, such explications offer an abstract, ideal form of party-based governance, they do provide a blueprint worth working towards.

The PTI and PPP deserve lots of credit for their intention to signal a break from past practice and carry out local body polls on partisan grounds in their respective provinces. The PML-N, who’ve played an important role in the existing democratic transition, and have often talked about the ills of dictatorships, should take similar initiative to shun this particularly troublesome legacy of past misadventures.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

umairjaved87@gmail.com

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