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WEEKLY
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| Provinces decide to restore old local bodies system |
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Monday, July 13, 2009
By our correspondent
ISLAMABAD: Provincial governments have decided to revive the old local bodies like municipal corporations, district councils, town committees and union councils in place of the present district and city governments etc., introduced by Pervez Musharraf eight years back.
After the provincial governments would be allowed by President Asif Ali Zardari to amend the local bodies’ law during this week, they will substantially change the prevailing arrangement, considered a bad legacy of Musharraf, a senior official told The News.
He said it was not necessary to replace the present nomenclature of the heads of these organisations, which was Nazim, with mayors or chairmen as these office-holders used to be called before 2001.
However, there are indications that some of the positive aspects of the present local government system would be retained in the changed laws. “The new structure would be somewhat between the present and previous systems,” another official said.
He said all the four provincial governments had formally approached Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to advise the president to accord his sanction to amend the local councils’ laws. The 17th Amendment placed the local government ordinances of the Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and the North West Frontier Province, issued in 2001, in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.
It was thus prescribed that all the 35 laws including these ordinances listed in this schedule shall not be altered, repealed or amended expressly or impliedly without the previous sanction of the president accorded after consultation with the prime minister.
On the provincial governments’ request, Gilani has approached Zardari to give the presidential sanction so that the provinces are permitted to amend the local council laws as they will. Thus, the provincial governments would be at liberty to structure these laws according to their own scheme of things and ground realities, the official said.
He said the provincial autonomy that had been taken away by the Musharraf regime, would also be restored this way and there would be no interference of the central government in the affairs of the provinces as far as the local councils were concerned.
The official said similarly the 2001 Local Government Ordinances, promulgated by Musharraf for all the provinces, had unnecessarily vested in the president the power of “sanction” to change these laws and created great disconnect and disharmony between the local councils and provincial governments.
He said after the presidential action, it would not be necessary for every provincial government to have the same law like that of its counterparts as was done in 2001. However, it is noteworthy that even otherwise the local government ordinances 2001 are to stand automatically omitted from the Sixth Schedule (meaning scrapping of the requirement of presidential sanction to change these laws), as per the Article 268, after six years of the passage of the 17th Amendment in coming December. Parliament had passed this amendment in December 2003.
When Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif visited Quetta a few months back, his Balochistan counterpart and the provincial governor complained that Musharraf’s local government system had hugely damaged the political climate in the province and tinkered with the tribal system, which needed to be dispensed with.
All the provincial governments joined hands in urging the prime minister to do away with the prevalent local government system, the official said. He said Musharraf’s system eliminated the urban and rural divide, which was a reality, and had to be dealt accordingly. |
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ISSN 1563-9479 
