Taking liberty of my little corner in this newspaper, Id like to thank the many dedicated internet pirates who make it possible for me to watch the latest episode of the American comedy TV show Parks and Recreation just a day after its original broadcast in the US. First recommended to me by fellow blogger Kalakawa, to whom I remain eternally grateful, Parks and Recreation is a mockumentary style show that covers life in the parks and recreation department of a local government setup in a fictitious small sized American town.
Apart from its constant mockery of the near-universal aspects of bureaucratic incompetence and red-tapeism, the show also highlights how communities become involved and eventually own decision making processes at the local level. You probably dont need an NBC produced sit-com, or for that matter a World Bank annual development review, to be aware of the pros and cons of localised governance, but in a country where the phrase true democracy is used with reckless abandon, it wont do much harm if our politicians watched it once in a while.
Democracy, in so far as its pro-poor, rooted and community based, is as worthy an ideal as any in this world, and within that, bringing decision making processes to the people themselves is probably the most substantive component of statecraft a department where we currently arent covering ourselves in any glory. The current provincial governments, while making procedural nods towards the importance of devolution, have continued to institutionalise bureaucratic authority at the district and divisional level and as things stand, it seems that the age-old Pakistani trait of instituting devolution under dictators and strengthening bureaucrats under politicians holds true to this day.
Does this apparently peculiar trait imply that our three men on horse (donkey) back were more committed to cultivating substantive democracy than our politicians? The answer according to Dr Ali Cheema (LUMS) and Dr Asim Khwaja (Harvard) is an emphatic no. Their detailed study on the history of devolution reform in Pakistan shows that all three systems were half-baked, half-hearted attempts at devolving decision making, and largely successful attempts at centralising more power and authority at the federal level.
For Ayub, the cultivation of a new breed of middle-income politicians allowed him to bypass opposition to both the one-unit scheme and his brand of interventionist dictatorial politics. For Zia, the 1979 reform introduced patronage based local governments that helped him cool off the political climate by redefining politics as an instrument to fix road potholes and leaky water-taps. In 2001, Musharraf enacted his variant of non-party based devolution to break the back of DMG bureaucrats and provincial politicians through a local setup which was toothless in terms of actual fiscal capacity, hence rendering its complete dependence on the central government for development and administrative expenditure.
All three of these reform efforts were done with the sole intention of making life in Islamabad more comfortable for the regime in power, and on each occasion, subsequent democratic governments were quick to undo these reforms.
To be fair, the impact of ill-intentioned devolution has been substantial on the way politics is conducted in Pakistan, but that hardly absolves our political parties from the responsibility of enacting sensible local government reforms.
Broadly speaking, there are two major benefits of localised administration: Firstly, nobody knows the problems of a community better than that community itself. In a day and age where the average constituency size of a provincial assembly member can cover both rural and urban areas, the chances of engaged and informed representation are close to zero. An empowered (both fiscally and authority-wise) local body setup representing a few neighborhoods can make community based development possible and at the same time actually allow our provincial and national level legislators to focus on law-making as opposed to fixing roads and water taps.
Secondly, party-based devolution will force political parties to develop grass-roots level linkages and organisational structures to deal with the rough and tumble aspects of local statecraft. By creating channels between Islamabad (or provincial capitals) and some random union council, consensus exercises to back policy reforms will be possible right down to the household level, and in the same vein, federal and provincial party bosses will be more aware of the issues faced by that elusive person known as the average Pakistani.
In a political culture where everyone is trying to establish his or her street-cred as the ultimate defender of democracy, the lack of attention being paid to devolution is pretty tragic. No party in this country seems to recognise the potential impact that sensible and informed devolution can have on the way our political economy is currently structured, and this ultimate reliance on bureaucrats and strong-men to run the show at the local level reeks of the same gross expediency weve become so used to. If the mainstream parties, especially the PML(N), dont realise this rather major oversight on their part, the process of institutionalising democracy will remain, by all accounts, nothing more than a procedural show-and-tell.
The writer works in the social sector and blogs at http://recycled-thought.blogspot.com. Contact him at [email protected]
