What has local government got to do with birds? Not much, on the face of it.

Ajmal Panezai remembers dying sparrows, scores of them, scattered across the lawn. They fell from pine trees that wailed like banshees in the storm, whipped by the wind and rain.

“Then came the water from the drains outside, drowning the birds before I could save them,” says Panezai in a quiet voice. “It was like the lawn had grown alien feathery flowers,” he reflects. “We put out two wheelbarrows full of carcasses. For days, the house reeked of their bodies decaying.”

All day long, Panezai and his family bailed out buckets of gutter water that had flooded the rooms in their house. In neighbourhoods along Quetta’s Brewery Road, other people were doing the same that day. Before August last year, when the rain brought the deluge, the streets along Brewery Road had been dug up to lay down sewerage pipes. Clogged drains and unrepaired roads made it difficult for the water to drain away, so it flooded the neighbourhood.

“For months, we waited for municipality to do something about the street but they didn’t, so I raised the front of the house to avoid the flooding again,” says Ajmal, pouring millet in clay plates to feed the sparrows. “Because our area lies at a gradient, sewerage from the city floods us when it rains. Drainage is our top problem. And the scarcity of water. Now that we have had local elections, we thought our elected representatives would repair the streets and drains but where are they? ”

Since the local government elections were held on Dec 7 last year, the residents of the area have routinely turned up at the door of Idrees Barraich, the local councillor. But Barraich, and thousands of other local bodies’ representatives, still await a transfer of power.

“It’s like a child born out of wedlock: we have been elected but we have no legitimacy,” says Barraich. “The councillors elected on Dec 7 will take the oath somewhere in June after the elections to reserve seats [May 29, 2014] and the election of the chairman and the vice chairman of local bodies [date not yet announced but likely to happen in June]. In between, we have no authority, no status.”

While the councillors blame the bureaucracy and the provincial government for their reluctance to share power with local bodies, the delay in the transfer of powers, according to the Provincial Election Commission, is due to vague election rules that need revisions to suit the system. The ambiguity of rules — that some say occurred because the province rushed into elections — has been a stumbling block in conducting the elections swiftly.

To begin with, the provincial government wanted elections on a party basis — which was not provided for in the Balochistan Local Government Act, 2010. After a quick amendment to the act in October, 2013, the elections were held on a party basis — only for the election authorities to realise that clear rules for elections to reserve seats were not in place. Moreover, the political parties in power wanted the reserve seats’ elections conducted through open ballot while the election commission emphasised secret balloting.

“Apart from the fact that we want the rules to be simple and easy to follow for the public, we also don’t want disputes and litigations that vague rules can lead to,” says Provincial Election Commissioner Sultan Bayazeed. “Our job is to conduct elections, not devise rules. That is the government’s job and that’s what took time.”

Political parties want to shape a system that is true to the 1973 Constitution in that it encompasses the two-tiered system of governance, federal and provincial, while encouraging governments to hold local elections. While the different local bodies’ legislations introduced by military governments always sought to create surrogates for a parliamentary dispensation, the political forces in the province are especially critical of the Local Government Act, 2001, passed under military president Pervez Musharraf.

“The powers the Constitution gave to provinces were taken away by the 2001 LG Act,” says Qadir Agha, a former nazim and provincial deputy secretary of the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, one of three parties in the provincial coalition government. “Our struggle is to retain that autonomy, especially after the 18th Amendment.”

Political forces have been inclined towards the Local Government Ordinance of 1979 that restores the commissioner system, as opposed to the total devolution of powers to district governments under the LG Act of 2001.

“The elected representatives are supposed to run the district governments, they are to exercise power as envisaged under LG Act 2001,” says Nasrullah Barraich, executive director of the Centre for Peace and Development, Balochistan. “Under the present system, powers are ‘delegated’ to them as opposed to ‘devolved’. The commissioner can take away and delegate the powers to anyone.”

Meanwhile, there is the thrill that Balochistan led the provinces in holding local government elections. For once, says Kazim Niaz, Secretary Local Government and Rural Development, Balochistan has been “the engine, not the bogie, leading the rest of the country”.

“We made the impossible possible,” says Bayazeed. “And despite the enormity of the exercise, we did it without any major hitches.”

Hitches don’t, it appears, include thousands of councillors all over Balochistan without a sense of purpose, their frustrated constituencies and sparrows drowned in drain-water.