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The Decentralisation Debate Begins Now

Tuesday, July 14, 2009
by Mosharraf Zaidi

The reviled and deeply undemocratic institution of the deputy commissioner, abolished by the local government reforms of 2001, is back, wearing law-and-order clothes. One of the enduring truths about Pakistan stands reaffirmed. Don’t mess with the DMG, baby. Eventually, like the rhythm, the DMG, is gonna getcha!

The rolling back of the local government reforms that were undertaken by Gen Musharraf’s regime back in 2001 is an unsurprising political event. From the day the reforms were announced, the Brahmins of the Pakistani public service, the District Management Group (DMG), swore to revive their fiefdoms in the field. True to their word, the gentlemen have prevailed.

Local governments always had limitations as a result of the dramatic, “big bang” reforms that Musharraf’s government introduced. The administrative structure never really got the kind of human resources it needed, and 12 administrative departments at the local level was always going to stretch the provincial and federal civil service ranks. The multiplicity of tiers was complex and confounding–with particular conceptual opacity about the need for districts or tehsils, especially when seen in the context of a disjoint between urban towns and rural tehsils. Nazim, or mayoral, elections were indirect and party-less–both incredibly cynical policy choices that never need repeating.

But there are victories, both small and large, that need to be fished out and preserved from the rise and fall of local governments. The lessons from the last eight years must inform reformist arguments in the future.

And those lessons go beyond the technical robustness of local government design or the tactical incrementalism of reform efforts. The major lesson from the story of local governments over the last eight years is that all reform is political. Military chain-of-command mindsets and conceptually seamless classroom constructs make for compelling flow charts, and exhaustive technical detail. But no amount of intellectual aggression, executive assertiveness, technical knowledge or life experience can trump bare-knuckle Pakistani politics.

The fight for local governments was not lost in the field–the districts, tehsils or the union councils or in the assemblies, or in budget sessions international conferences, or Islamabad roundtables. It was lost in the provincial capitals where the DMG understands decision-making, while reformists not only failed to understand the provinces, but in fact, had no real presence there either.

The LGO, as it had come to be called, is shorthand for four separate laws, one each for the provinces. The provinces, however, never had any real say in deciding what kind of local governments they wanted, having the all-knowing federal government of the time, the pre-election, pre-referendum Musharraf government decide for them, back in 2001. The fact that even the laws for local governments were abbreviated into an acronym reflecting a centralising, instead of decentralizing spirit, should tell us most everything we need to know about the failure of the LGOs.

Under the Constitution, local government is an undisputedly provincial subject. In fact, from a constitutional perspective, the existence and status of local governments is almost unquestionably, a matter left up to the provinces.

The caveat to that reading of the Constitution, of course, is that there is very little room for provincial lallygagging. Around the places that matter most in the Constitution, the existence of local governments is not a question of if, or when. It is a question of how. The only discretion provinces have with respect to local governments is how each province wants to set them up.

Under the Principles of Policy, Article 32, spells out the genetic roots of local government in the Pakistani state: “The State shall encourage local Government institutions composed of elected representatives of the areas concerned and in such institutions special representation will be given to peasants, workers and women.”

In both Articles 63 and 73, local governments are referred to in defining the qualifications to hold office as a member of the Majlis-e-Shoora (National Assembly), and in defining what a Money Bill is (respectively).

Article 140-A adds fully devolved local governments to the list of responsibilities that the provinces must undertake. But, of course, this article (a dead giveaway, by virtue of that “A”) was not articulated by the framers of the Constitution–but instead by the father of enlightened moderation, Gen Musharraf (with some help from Chacha Qazi Hussain, and Chacha Fazlur Rehman, both co-guardians of the Legal Framework Order of 2002 that added that mutilation, and several others to the Constitution).

And that, of course, is the enduring tragedy of the Pakistani story. Local governments carry the burden of being the products of an illegitimate authoritarian government. Forever bastardised by their lineage, this round of reform efforts for local governments was always going to end in an inglorious blaze. The only thing surprising is the level of ease with which old ways of doing things have been allowed to settle in, over the last year.

En route to death in their current form, local governments in Pakistan managed to put together an impressive roster of achievements. Politically, local governments created an entirely new level of empowerment of village and street politicos by injecting 84,000 new seats to the patronage micro-economies of Pakistan. This linear “short-route accountability” of office is a potential game-changer, at least in the local discourse about some dimensions of service-delivery.

That very accessibility of the short-route accountabilities of decentralised local governments helped forge a new category of politician. These politicians have impressive management skills, and a comprehension of how things work in the microcosm of local politics that many accomplished national level politicians simply do not have. Nafisa Shah (PPP) of Khairpur, both Naimatullah Khan (Jamaat-e-Islami) and Mustafa Kamal (MQM) of Karachi, both Zahid Nazir (PPP) and Rana Zahid Tauseef (PML-N, and then PML-Q) in Faisalabad, all demonstrated that local governments allow young and creative politicians to demonstrate real value and effectiveness, in spite of their party affiliations.

Fiscally, local governments were able to spend money more quickly than federal and provincial vertical programmes can, because of their accessibility to local markets and networks. Critics are quick to scream bloody murder, in terms of the lack of fiscal accountability of local governments. That is a really good point. Except, that those critics are mostly DMG officers, all of whom tend to want to be posted in the field as deputy commissioners–and they have no evidence that the commissionerate system was any less corrupt than the two-pronged attack team of the Nazim and DCO. Not surprisingly, the DMG wins both ways, in the rent-seeking game in local government–because DCOs are almost exclusively chosen from the DMG.

Of course, no political government is going to get rid of the entire system in one fell swoop. The DMG will get the magistracy, politicians will get local seats and discretionary spending, and the people will get a watered-down and confused version of grassroots democracy from governments that were supposed to do better. As tempting as it is to lament the death of a reasonably good system with some weaknesses, it is important to celebrate the process too. Pakistani local governance has taken a turn for the worse, but it has done so through a process that is legitimate and sustainable. The good fight for effective, democratic and transparent local governments has not ended. It has just begun.