Governance is a quick response by the government to the needs of people. It is a complex process whereby some sectors of the society wield power, enact and promulgate public policies, which directly affect the economic and social developments of society.
Each democratic regime inherently entails three tiers of government: federal, provincial and local governments. The federal government ensures the existence of a state. Provincial government addresses the question of nationality. Meanwhile, local governments effectively provide public services at the doorstep to the people of the concerned locality.
Local governments offer the best opportunities to the people of the concerned locality to easily approach their local elected representatives to meet the problems they face. People have prompt and free access to express their opinion in a process of policymaking regarding any social problem. Similarly, they can easily hold their local political representatives accountable for being involved in the crime of misuse or nonuse of public funds. The system of local governments also warmly recognises the basic ingredients of governance, like citizen participation, transparency, accountability and efficiency being laid down by the United Nations and World Bank.
With the emergence of the 18th amendment, each provincial government, under article 140A of the constitution of 1973, is constitutionally bound to establish local governments. Each province is bound to devolve subjects altogether related to political, financial and administrative responsibilities to elected representatives of local government.
But, unfortunately, the system of local governments has never been implemented by former civilian governments since 1947. Thanks to the august Supreme Court for its directives issued in 2015 to all provincial governments to conduct local governments election!
However, three former military dictators who intermittently ruled the country had properly established the system of local governments with the ulterior motives to provide a legal basis to their de facto regimes at the national and international level.
There are a few stocked systematic and longstanding hurdles in the way of article 140A, which do not let it take the full course. Firstly, provincial governments feel hesitant in transferring power in true letter and spirit at the local level on the account of the threat they feel to their political and financial power use by them at the upper level. Similarly, bureaucracy at the district level also does not want to devolve administrative and financial power seized by them and see itself immediate subordinate to local elected representatives.
The lack of local governments has given deadly birth to a crowd of crises like bad governance, water crises, health care crises, crises of services delivery, transportation and sanitation problem, lack of development and social welfare projects etc.
The stocked problems faced by people daily at the local level can be easily solved if each province implements, in full force, the local government’s laws. The functional jurisdiction, which the local governments can generally exercise, under the ambit of local governments laws, encompasses the public health, education, water supply, town planning, social welfare, revenue and estate, agriculture, rural development and rural works, population welfare coordination, human resource management, town planning and development etc.
It is high time to amend the local government’s law to do away with the stocked lacunas happen therein.
Local governments must be made financially empower. Funds received by provincial governments from the federal divisible pool must be distributed to local elected representatives of each district. Share of each district must be specified in the provincial finance commission as the shares of provinces in the National Finance Commission. It will put a bar on representatives of the provincial assemblies to dishonestly divert the share of development fund from one district to another. It will also reinstate the long lost confidence of the ordinary people over the performance of local governments.
The lack of local governments has given deadly birth to a crowd of crises
To ease the financial vulnerability of the local government’s collection of taxes at the local level, it must be declared an exclusive domain of local governments. The collected taxes at the local level must be deposited in the treasury of the concerned district. It will make them able to properly meet the needs of local people, including education, health care and social welfare service etc.
The mechanism for accountability must be constituted to look into the proper use of the public fund. A committee at the district level is to be constituted, comprising of two private members of each union council, District Nazim, one member of the FIA and session judge of the concerned district as a chairman of the committee. Every year, the committee must examine the use of the development fund of every local elected representative. If any representative, in case if found guilty of embezzlements of the public fund will be held liable by the Federal Investigation Agency.
The local governments must be made fully autonomous as provincial governments. The jurisdiction of affairs of local governments must be chalked out to legally bar the arbitrary intervention of bureaucracy and representatives of provincial assemblies. LG laws should devolve all key municipal functions, such as water supply, sanitation, education, health, revenue & estate, etc, to the lowest tier of local governments.
The election for local governments shall be held on a fixed time. Being a custodian of the constitution of 1973, the superior judiciary can play its important role to make sure proper implementation of the Article 140A.
Devolution of powers at the local level is the need of time to properly address the long list of problems that people face at a lower level. It will also assist the state institutions in combating the flood of crises which has negatively affected their services delivery statutorily saddled upon them.
The writer is a lawyer stationed in Islamabad