THIS second article focuses on highlighting the essence of the people-serving local government system that has (fortunately for the people of Sindh) been reintroduced, as well as how governance will be seriously hampered when this pro-people governance system will inevitably clash with the authoritarian anti-people colonial Police Act 1861.
The DC-SP based governance system discussed in the first article had evoked in the people the feeling of being left out from governance. The British therefore introduced powerless local ‘bodies’ in 1909, 1919 and 1924 responsible only for municipal functions in just the large urban areas.
These laws were cloaked in superficial national façades in the Ayub and Ziaul Haq eras up to 1979. And yet, even these municipal entities remained subordinated to the deputy commissioner or commissioner empowered as controller of local governments to countermand any executive order, resolution, byelaw, or budget of the local ‘bodies’.
The local government system devolved the deputy commissioner’s latent political power formally to elected leaders of the people. It de-concentrated the functions of most provincial departments, as well as the 10 functions of the deputy commissioner.
It decentralised these functions to officers of the district, tehsils and unions, who were empowered with the authority to enforce laws within the sphere of their respective responsibilities, and placed them under elected heads of their local governments. It created a system of formula-based transfer of financial resources to each local government along with mechanisms for both internal and external audit.
The law embodied a potent system of dual control over the local governments — the first by the people through their local councils empowered to legislate as well as to monitor their governments; and the second by the province through its local government commission and the provincial assembly.
The local government system thus empowered three-tier local governments, headed by approachable elected leaders, mandated to deliver or face censure or dismissal; and thus trained in wielding political and legislative power coupled with administrative and financial authority for shouldering higher leadership responsibilities.
Under the principle of subsidiarity, the service delivery function of the provincial government was decentralised to local governments, thus freeing the provincial governments to perform five major functions: interacting with the federal and other
provincial governments; formulating policies and strategies; enacting new laws and modernising old laws; directly managing only trans-district functions; and exercising control over local governments through the local government commission.After the empowerment of the provincial governments through the recent elimination of the Concurrent Legislative List under the very same principle of subsidiarity, the fruits of devolution were expected to ripen in the form of even better service delivery by the provincial and local governments.
To lend focus to those municipal functions that affect every citizen perpetually, LGO 2001 narrowed down the scope of the municipal role by excluding education, training and health from municipal responsibility; and assigned this pruned municipal function to the town/tehsil municipal administration (TMA) of each city/common district.
Functions relating to education, training and health were consequently assigned to the district governments. The responsibility for all schools and colleges, whether established by the provincial governments or the erstwhile municipalities, thus passed to the district governments, leaving specialised colleges within the domain of provincial governments. Similarly, all health facilities from dispensaries to general hospitals were decentralised to district governments, leaving specialised hospitals with the provincial governments.
LGO 2001 converted the ‘tehsil’ into an integrated rural-urban municipal entity with its urban as well as rural population enjoying municipal facilities as a fundamental right. Its TMA has a planning office to plan and manage its coherent urbanisation. It was envisaged that gradual modernisation of agriculture, and establishment of industry, would create new businesses and jobs in each tehsil. This, along with the growth of municipal, health and education facilities, was expected to promote rapid urbanisation of the whole tehsil, and its evolution into a coherent city district.
This countrywide phenomenon would enable the people to stay in their home tehsils and districts instead of migrating to the few existing cities. This trend of ‘urbanisation of rural areas’ would thus gradually arrest the unabated ‘ruralisation of the urban areas’.
Police Order 2002 was designed in harmony with this local government system. The two systems — local governance and policing — were integrated through authority over the head of the district police being given under both the systems to the district nazim, and to no other elected leader or bureaucrat; and both the district nazim and the head of the district police placed under the oversight of public safety commissions.
With the reintroduction of the district magistracy in any form empowered with authority over the police, the district nazim is likely to experience insubordination by the executive magistracy as well as the police; and he, along with the rest of the political leadership, could even feel threatened by both, especially in the absence of public safety commissions.
With the police not exclusively responsible for policing the district to the satisfaction of the district nazim and the people, incompetence and tyrannical behaviour of the police will return, thus leaving the people as helpless before the police and the executive magistracy as they used to be. With the whole district government thus undermined, the governance system could soon border on collapse.
With the return of the local government system Sindh is halfway back to good governance already. Restoration of Police Order 2002 will complete the virtuous circle. If elections within this year can restore political leadership to the system, these July-August hiccups might even be forgotten, and 2011 remembered as the year in which the political elite truly set the stage for the establishment of a stable people-and-state-serving democracy from bottom to top.
If this does not happen, the consequences for democracy could be grave; because it will convince the people that politics is not about improving the lot of the people, or preventing what looks to them like a ‘failing’ state turning into a ‘failed’ state; but only about an oligarchy having fun at the expense of the people, generation after generation.
— Concluded
The writer was the founding chairman of the National Reconstruction Bureau and pioneered the reconstruction of the institutions of state during the period 2000-2002.
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