Going local

Covid-19 has not just exposed the state of public health infrastructure around the world but also raised serious questions on the government efficiency in terms of combating a disaster.

It is not just a crisis of public health, it is rather testing governments’ capacity to sustain an effective public service delivery. Currently, public health is but one way to test the efficiency and capacity of a government as the shockwaves created by Covid-19 are much bigger and deeper than just the most glaring statistics about the number of infected people and the death rates.

As time is passing, developing countries, especially with failing economies, are showing an increasing trend for Covid-19 spread. This places them at extreme risk of the widespread virus that has posed extreme challenges to even the most developed and wealthy Western economies.

Pakistan – with one of the lowest per capita income and poorest health care apparatus among even the South Asian counterparts – is faced with two immediate challenges; one, containing the spread of the deadly virus and two, providing livelihoods to the poorest segments of the country in the absence of substantial state-led safety nets.

Questions are raised on the structural impediments that limit the efforts to combat the pandemic and inability on the part of the Pakistani government to take measures with clarity and thorough deliberation. Despite the early warnings and horrific news that kept coming from China, Iran, Italy and other European countries, the Pakistani government remained disconnected with the communities till very recently. The main reason behind such disconnect is the non-existence of an efficient local government system that can engage with the local communities to partake precautionary measures for combating a crisis such as Covid-19.

The local government system is thought of as the most representative form of government. However, the history of the local government system in the Subcontinent dates back to the colonial-era engineering to restrain the local population to engage in politics. It was a top-down approach rather than a bottom-up representative model. The idea was to control local governance through non-elected offices of bureaucracy. In Pakistan, it remained a tool for political engineering during dictatorial regimes.

Even today, Sindh is the only province with an existing functional local government in Pakistan. The other three provinces – Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan – dissolved the local governments under the pretext of new elections that never occurred. Article 140-A of the constitution of Pakistan binds every province to establish a local government system and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected representatives of the local governments.

This, however, seems only a promise with hardly any serious will for implementation. The vacuum created by the absence of local governments manifests itself in poor service delivery and non-representation across all provinces. The recent surge of the Covid-19 infections and inability of provincial governments to combat the virus is a barefaced example of such a vacuum.

Effective local governments are important because they are the first point of contact for the communities they serve. The local government institutions can enable and enforce federal or provincial government policies, gather information and most importantly devise the local policy frameworks to cater to the most pressing local needs. Establishing a functional local government system in order to provide for an advanced response mechanism in such a grave crisis is needed more than ever.

For instance, the local governments, if they existed, could have played a really instrumental role in both the mitigation and prevention of the virus in the current scenario. The lowest tier of local government bodies could have directly reached out to the communities to ensure quarantining measures by local collaborations with community and faith based leaders. Additionally, the basic healthcare units at the town or neighborhood council level would have been a key resource to tap onto to not only spread awareness but also to carry out the preventive measures to fight Covid-19.

Despite the historic enactment of the 18th constitutional amendment – that places great autonomy with the provincial governments – it is equally important to note that provincial governments are not a replacement for local governments, especially when the size of provinces is extremely large. It is an established fact worldwide that the local government system leads to an increased political consciousness and is one of the most practical ways to establish a participatory democratic culture in any given setting. It has been a widely recognized way of devolving powers to increase public service delivery such as public health, sanitation, education etc.

On the contrary, local governments in Pakistan remain highly dependent on either central or provincial governments in order to exercise their power. Also, in a country like Pakistan, state institutions are not as popular with the public in smaller towns and rural areas. Hence, the local government system, in the absence of public trust on state institutions, provides an excellent opportunity to those dissatisfied segments of society to come forward and take part in the political activities that matter to them.

Most importantly, provincial governments need to revisit the recent amendments to the existing LG laws to see the glitches that hinder the meaningful devolution of power to the common citizen. The need of the hour for mainstream political parties, and central and provincial governments is to sit together and brainstorm for an effective and functional system of local government that devolves power to the smaller units in order to establish a democracy that is representative and participatory in nature, and has the capacity to face a challenge as gigantic as Covid-19.

The writer teaches development at Bahria University in Islamabad.

Twitter: @assad_shoaib