Local Bodies System has to go along with Dictator

Following thought provoking letter got published in Daily Dawn on June 05, 2008

The local bodies system

THERE are statements these days, in newspapers, of influential people about the most significant issue of local bodies system introduced by the dictator to create a third tier of support at the grossroots level. People in general are very much impatient to see what their representatives are going to decide about this confused and collapsed system.

As a former federal secretary and with an extensive experience in public service, I have observed the following flaws in the local bodies system:

— It has made expensive the local administration for a country that is regularly undergoing budgetary deficits.

— It has created confusion and nobody knows where they should go for solution to their problems.

— It has politicised the bureaucracy, and seasoned public servants are at the mercy of a matriculate nazim.

— It has worsened the law and order situation, local health, educational institutions, created unhygienic cities and districts and skyrocketed prices.

— Since the locally elected nazims are to settle old scores with each other, the public servant seems paralysed with no power to solve people’s problems.

— It has led to massive corruption on the part of nazims as electoral expenses are recovered through embezzlement of districts’ development funds.

On the basis of the above flaws and many more that I cannot write due to the limited space, I strongly advice the present government to simply scrap the local bodies system. The country is already in multiple crises and we cannot afford another one, especially when it is a blind and deaf attempt to import institutions from abroad without considering the environment in which they are to be planted.

I strongly suggest that we need to revert to the old system of commissioner and deputy commissioner. So far I have observed that all the four provinces have unanimously evolved a consensus on scrapping the local bodies system and reverting to the commissioner system.

INAYATULLAH KHAN
Islamabad