IT was just a month or two after the military coup of October 1999 that a retired lieutenant general, Tanvir Naqvi, propounded the coup maker's 'vision' of governance before a group of journalists in Karachi.

As Naqvi launched himself on a discourse on “power to the people at the grass roots” by radically altering the country's political, administrative and judicial structures, an impish hack rose from among the gaggle to interrupt him “General, who has given you the authority to bring about a revolution?”

The retired general's quick response “we have assumed this authority ourselves” was drowned in a roar of laughter as he gloated over the impact of his repartee. It was a display of hubris uncommon even for a dictator. He dismissed the dissenters seated on the stage with him (this writer among them) as relics of a slavish past.

Naqvi might as well have added that his self-assumed authority was reinforced by the Supreme Court (all of its then 12 judges) which while validating the extra-constitutional intervention “on the basis of the doctrine of state necessity and the principle of salus populi suprema lex” also permitted Gen Musharraf to amend the constitution “for the attainment of his declared objectives”. The doctrine and the principle, the court went on to observe, were recognised in Islam. What more could a coupster have asked for?

Naqvi's harangue at Karachi marked the beginning of a “road show” that ended in the mutilation of the constitution and the destruction of the country's age-old administrative and judicial system. But the Supreme Court didn't feel persuaded enough to exercise its power of judicial review which it had promised in the coup-validating order.

Having thus assumed total power under the deceptively modest and commercial-sounding title of chief executive, Gen Pervez Musharraf embarked on a course to change the political, legal and administrative structures as no other chief martial law administrator had done before him — not even Z.A. Bhutto who was the most dominant political figure of his time in addition to being CMLA. Musharraf strode into a territory which the military commanders and elected leaders with greater credentials before him had feared to tread.

He imagined himself to be the messiah that a misgoverned country had been waiting for. In his retirement he must be puzzled to see how what he had done in years was being undone in months. But his inept, confused successors are unable to decide how to rebuild whatever he had destroyed nor do they seem inclined to retain whatever little good he had done — just because he had done it. No one is willing to separate the little grain that was in his reforms, from the abundance of chaff. Such is the degree of vengeance. That grain is the local government.

The departing British had bequeathed to the subcontinent a system of local government comprising chiefly the district boards, municipal councils and panchayats. The children of the generation spanning the partition were educated in schools and treated in dispensaries that were run by the councils. The schools and hospitals run by the government or denominational missions were all in large towns. Minor disputes were mostly settled in the village panchayats. India and Sri Lanka preserved and strengthened the local councils. Here we ran them down. For long years they were either extinct or controlled by government officials.

When revived, as by Ayub Khan in the 1960s, and by Pervez Musharraf in 2002, the dominant consideration was to create a base of electoral support for the rulers. Ayub Khan's elected councils were led by bureaucrats — district councils were chaired by the deputy commissioner and city corporations by officials of equal rank. Yet they gave a new impetus to development in backward areas. The first school for girls was built and a public well dug for the Mohmand tribes (now up in arms) in the 1960s when this writer was the political agent and chairman of the agency council there.

It was the political part of the field marshal's plan that failed. The combined support of basic democrats and bureaucrats could not sustain him in power for ever. Pervez Musharraf tried the opposite approach. He placed all officials in a district under elected nazims, transferred almost every provincial function to the governments in the districts, took them under his own wing and gave them a lot of money. Karachi city district, for instance, received from the centre three times as much as its own income from taxation and services. The district nazims became his personal, pampered representatives.

By now it is obvious that overweening nazims are not going to outlast Musharraf just as the subservient basic democrats didn't Ayub Khan. The lesson to be drawn is that only such local government institutions will endure that are not controlled by the bureaucrats or do not trample on the regulatory jurisdiction of the provincial government.

Legislators, ministers and chief ministers are all justifiably outraged by the power and patronage that Musharraf conferred on the nazims at their cost. The looming danger is that in their vengeance they might altogether abolish the district government or reduce it to a mere appendage of the provincial government.

The civic and regulatory roles are quite distinct. A political nazim cannot be a deputy commissioner just as a deputy commissioner should not be a mayor. A local government (as in Karachi) should not be seen building “state-of-the-art” cardiac centres while its dispensaries are crumbling, or constructing free corridors for motorists when there is no bus for the people to ride nor a footpath to walk on, or build skyscrapers while raw sewers pollute the sea.

And a provincial government should not be running primary schools or health centres in far-flung villages which do not exist on the ground. In any case the nazims who were all staunch party men could not ever measure up to the responsibility of maintaining law and order in a highly partisan environment. The obvious result has been lawlessness and disorder.

The future role of the local government should be restricted to local affairs but, at the same time, its jurisdiction should be defined and protected in the constitution and the provincial governments must not be empowered to supersede the councils as they had been routinely doing in pre-Musharraf times. The parliamentary committees which are soon expected to consider the transfer of subjects from the centre to the provinces should also decide which of their functions are better left to the districts and tiers below.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com