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After much foot-dragging, and tantrum-throwing, and failed attempts at clutching various kinds of legal straws, it appears the judiciary has finally managed to overpower the executive in setting the local government election process in some sort of motion.
Barring any last-minute hiccups, elections for cantonment boards — in all 42 cantonments across the country — are due to be held on April 25.
Cantonment board polls will soon be followed by local government elections in KP in May, and in Punjab in September.
Read: Schedule for LG polls in cantt areas announced
By December this year, it is expected that residents of all ‘settled’ areas of the country — even CDA-ruled Islamabad — will have some sort of elected representation in municipal governance.
Given the irreverent attitude of at least two provincial administrations towards the idea of elected local governments, this renewed drive is the result of some persistent attention directed by the higher judiciary. The courts’ diligence has not only made the elections a strong probability, it has also led to the removal of several undemocratic and politically dubious clauses — like the self-delimitation clause in Punjab and Sindh’s local government act, and the non-party clause in the Cantonment Board ordinance.
Also read: Cantonment polls on party basis, says ECP
As has been stated by several writers on these very pages, the setting up of any kind of local government system in the country is, by all accounts, a good thing. On the delivery front, it allows for more localised planning, and more accountable service provision. It reduces the amount of bureaucratic hoops individuals have to jump through to gain access to the state, and most of all, it makes interfacing with the government easier. Having one deputy commissioner administering an entire district is infinitely less desirable than having an elected council for each locality.
The courts’ diligence has not only made local government elections a strong probability, it has also led to the removal of several undemocratic and politically dubious clauses.
On the political front, a local government set-up can produce several positive outcomes, though that in itself remains contingent on the generosity and interests of provincial-level leaders. Municipal bodies can provide party activists a platform to make the switch from being mobilisers and vote-gatherers to administrators. A conventional critique levelled against Pakistan’s democracy is the lack of administrative experience of most elected representatives. Most are good at politics (winning an election is, after all, fairly difficult) but they rarely prioritise policy; preferring to deal mostly with ‘development projects’ instead.
Part of the reason is that provincial governments are tightly managed by a small sub-set of the provincial elite, and the federal government remains the domain of the top-tier leadership. Local governments, which cover a fairly expansive administrative domain, are ultimately left in the hands of all-purpose bureaucrats. The difference in quality of representation and quality of representatives, thus, varies immensely between various tiers in the party structure.
A complementary consequence of breeding politicians through a party-based local government system is that it creates a stronger party identity at the local level. Politicians, especially those who work as fixers and intermediaries for MNAs and MPAs, currently find it easy to switch in and out of parties depending on the political climate. Under direct devolved accountability, voters will be able to link politicians and parties with actual service delivery outcomes, thus leading to a more coherent party structure at the local level.
Thirdly, having smaller constituencies helps smaller political parties to get a foot in the door. Left-wing organisations in the country, for example, have historically struggled to match the political and financial resources spent by mainstream parties during national and provincial elections. As a result, their electoral fortunes have remained bleak. A reduction in the size of the constituency — something that happens with local government elections — allows smaller groups to concentrate their energies in areas where they have pockets of support, or where they’ve done organisational work.
There is, however, serious work still to be done in order to move from mere procedural local representation towards substantive representation. In the cantonment ordinance, the extraordinary powers granted to the station commander — usually a serving brigadier — by Gen Musharraf, which allows him to appoint as many unelected members to the board as there are elected/reserved members, needs to be done away with. The veto/supreme executive power for the station commander also needs to be removed.
The provincial set-ups that divide each union council into wards ends up creating single-member constituencies, thus replicating the first-past-the-post system at the local level. This ensures the reproduction of local hierarchies, and it gives local party bosses a great deal of control in who gets to be elected. A truly representative system would be one that functions on an open-list proportional basis that allocates council seats to each party on the basis of their electoral popularity. This would give smaller parties a certain voice in municipal affairs, while the open-list system would ensure that the electorate vets candidates nominated by the parties.
If and when the current process goes through, it will have one major advantage over previous incarnations of devolution in Pakistan: its being introduced (grudgingly or otherwise) by democratically elected provincial administrations. This means that the provinces, which now finally have greater fiscal control after the 18th Amendment, can set a politically optimal level of devolution, one that doesn’t create breakdown-inducing confrontations within and between parties. All previous systems suffered from legitimacy crises because they were purposefully designed and implemented in a way to exclude popular groups and parties.
Many argue that the institutional re-adjustment after the lawyers’ movement has produced an overexcited higher judiciary, which in turn, has yielded mixed results for democracy. While this may be true for any number of other things, the courts’ position and persistence on local governments is worth appreciating. This is one move that promises to strengthen the country’s democratic credentials, not lessen them in any way.
The writer teaches political science at LUMS.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2015
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