Daily Times editorial Jan 2, 2010

Demise of Musharraf’s local bodies

Musharraf’s local bodies system has become history. What, if anything, will or should replace it we will discuss anon. It is important to understand that Musharraf, like all military dictators before him, attempted to bypass the political forces and provinces in order to have a base of direct political support for his one-man rule. This base came into being in the shape of the local bodies ‘elected’ in 2001. Ostensibly partyless, these polls actually were one-party (Musharraf). Subsequently, Musharraf went further in trying to consolidate his illegitimate grip on power through a fraudulent presidential referendum (a la Ziaul Haq) and then an equally fraudulent general election, both in 2002. In the latter contest, he managed to win over a whole bevy of PML-N turncoats to form the PML-Q, widely regarded until his departure as the King’s Party. Neither scheme at the local or national level panned out exactly as Musharraf may have wanted. The best laid plans…?
The local bodies so dear to Musharraf soon metamorphosed into dens of pro-Musharraf vested interest, the devil’s bargain being that Musharraf looked the other way while the tribe of nazims created by him enriched themselves at the state’s and public’s expense. The king’s party abandoned its mentor as soon as he ran into trouble in 2007 because of his rash, commando-style mishandling of Laal Masjid and the Chief Justice of Pakistan.
The term of the local bodies ended on October 31, 2009. However, they received a brief new lease of life till December 31, 2009, as the federal and provincial governments discussed how they wished to proceed. All four Local Government Ordinances promulgated in the four provinces were protected by Musharraf’s including them in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. Now it is being reported that President Asif Ali Zardari has deleted these Ordinances from the Sixth Schedule, ending their protected status and reverting the local bodies system to the purview of the provinces to legislate/amend these local government ordinances to suit themselves. There remains the question, though, whether the president can in fact delete the protection of the Sixth Schedule in this manner. Even if he issues an Ordinance to carry out this deletion, it will require to be turned into an Act by parliament sooner or later (the shelf life of an ordinance, after two repromulgations allowed in the constitution, cannot in theory be more than one year). Such an Act of parliament implies an amendment to the constitution (or its sixth schedule). Would that not require a two thirds majority of both houses? If this argument is correct, no one should be surprised if the next set of writs in the Supreme Court revolves around this issue. Some are of the view that the local government ordinances have to be amended even to appoint administrators in place of the outgoing nazims, as some provinces wish to do. Such an amendment too may fall foul of the constitutional/legal tangle being suggested above.
It goes without saying that no democratically-minded person can have any quarrel with the concept of local government. The principle of subsidiarity needs to be adopted, which simply means that if a work can be done at a lower rung of the democratic structure, it should not be done at a higher plane. This principle applies to both local bodies as well as provincial autonomy. The polity is already seized of the latter issue. It is now to be hoped that even if the temporary expedient of appointing administrators is felt necessary, it should be as brief an interlude as possible, and elected local bodies should take their rightful place as quickly as possible, as behoves a democratic order and the effort to devolve governance and delivery down to the appropriate level for the benefit of the people.