Local Polls Won’t Fix Governance

Punjab’s cabinet has just approved Rs12. 52 billion for local government elections. On paper, this is good news. The province hasn’t had functioning local governments in over four years. The last ones were dissolved in 2019, restored by the courts and then left to complete their terms without much authority. Since then, successive governments have repeatedly rewritten the Local Government Act, forcing the Election Commission to restart its preparations each time. So yes, funding the polls is long overdue. However, examined within its political context, the decision appears less like reform and more like strategic recalibration. The announcement followed closely on the heels of ministerial statements suggesting that creating new provinces or administrative units might resolve Pakistan’s persistent governance deficits. Sindh, China boost investment cooperation at Shanghai Conference The Punjab Assembly had already passed resolutions supporting Janoobi Punjab and Bahawalpur as separate provinces. That debate was gaining momentum. Then, suddenly, the province found the political will to hold local elections that had been stalled for years. This suggests a calculated attempt to demonstrate that devolution within the existing provincial structure can substitute for the more disruptive project of redrawing provincial boundaries altogether. This is not, in principle, an indefensible position. Administrative decentralisation and territorial division represent two distinct mechanisms for addressing the same underlying grievance: the concentration of decision-making authority in provincial capitals at the expense of peripheral regions. Suspect arrested over alleged assault on journalist at Nazimabad Police Station This is where the government’s move falls short. Local governments in Pakistan have a long history of being elected and then starved of authority. Provincial governments control the money and the bureaucracy. You can appoint union council secretaries, allocate budgets and hold elections, but none of it changes who actually decides how development funds are spent. If this round of local government repeats that pattern, it will not have solved anything. It will merely have bought time. The demand for new provinces did not emerge from nowhere. It arose from decades of people in southern Punjab and Bahawalpur feeling governed from Lahore without being heard by Lahore. Aurangzeb calls for replacing costly borrowing with longer-maturity financing A union council election does not address that grievance if the union council cannot exercise authority independently. Real devolution also means fiscal devolution. It means local bodies deciding their own budgets, not merely implementing decisions made above them. So the question worth asking is not whether Punjab will hold these elections. PILDAT already expects them by November. The real question is whether this represents genuine decentralisation or a pressure valve dressed up as reform. If it is the latter, the demand for new provinces will not disappear. It will simply wait for the next local government to fail to deliver, only to return stronger. TDAP training SHANZA MUNIR, Islamabad.

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