Mustafa Kamal slams ‘self-proclaimed democratic rulers’ for not transferring powers to grassroots level

Pak Sarzameen Party Chairman Syed Mustafa Kamal on Friday said that for “self-acclaimed democratic rulers”, the democracy was just a matter of availing personal power and resources because when it came to transferring the powers and resources to the common man, “all self-proclaimed democratic champions prove to be oblivion and apathetic”.

“The present so-called democratic rulers of Pakistan have staged a democratic coup against the first tire of democracy, which is the local bodies’ government that is completely dysfunctional.

What an irony is that those who beat the trumpets of democracy prior to elections strangle democracy as soon as they came into the government,” he said. On the one hand, he said, Prime Minister Imran Khan was paying mere lip service for a strong local government system to the nation.

“The fact is that he has deactivated the local government set-up during his two and a half years of government in the Centre, while on the other hand, the self-proclaimed champions of democracy from the PDM platform have not even bothered to call for the holding of local government elections even once.”

He added: “PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif whose favourite slogan is ‘Mujhe kyun nikala’ (why did you oust me?) on a daily basis, never once said that "Unhain kyun nikaka" (why did you oust them?) for the 57,000 elected local bodies representatives of Punjab, who were directly responsible for the public issues.”

He said the present government was not holding the local bodies’ elections in Punjab because “it knows it will lose”. The PSP chairman expressed these views while addressing separate video link meetings with the party’s office-bearers in Punjab and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa.

Kamal said the local governments in KP and Balochistan had been dysfunctional and were instead governed by the bureaucrats. “Following the federal government, the Sindh government has also crippled the local government system and is not serious about holding the local bodies’ elections.”

He continued: “Billions of rupees worth of development work that was supposed to be done through the elected local bodies’ representatives is now being done through the bureaucracy. These bureaucrats are not accountable to the public and the corruption is rampant.”