The News International: PK: Thursday,
March 02, 2017.
"Right
to Information (RTI) is the foundation of transparency in governance; its
implementation at district level will proactively promote ownership of the
system by all people and ensure accountability of government officials."
“Local
government is all community driven; the informal institutions of voluntarism
like civil defence and scouts need to be revived. One of the major challenges
is that we have to build ownership of this system among people. It is a
challenge because the problem is that local government historically has been associated
with military dictatorships. Democracies somehow have shied away from it
whereas this is the basic building block on which the entire democracy stands
and the foundation of this building block is transparency.
This was
shared as the basic principles of governance by the recently elected young
District Council Chairman Narowal Ahmed Iqbal Chaudhry, as he sat down for an
interview with The News.
This
interview was significant because this thirty-something young public
representative possesses a unique characteristic that not many in our political
system do. Ahmed has actually studied Local Government and Public Finance as
his focus area at the University of Pennsylvania during his Masters in Public
Administration, before he applied for the job – ran for the office of Chairman
District Council. He has also worked with The World Bank as a consultant on
Urban Transport after completing his studies. Following his unopposed victory
in the local government, now he is busy using all his education and experience
abroad in Narowal putting into effect the concept of “Think Global – Act Local”
in the district of Narowal.
Talking about
the concerns regarding the local government system being spineless, he said,
‘The system being broken is the excuse of those who consider being a public
representative a position of power and privilege. In contrast, it’s a position
of immense responsibility, tougher than any other job where you have to work
day and night and there are no holidays.’ I would, however, lobby for the district
council chairman to be made ex-officio chairman of the District Health and
Education Authorities so that we could have some sort of say even if at the
policy and strategy level if not at financial level, he added.
One of the
key lessons I've learned through my education regarding local government and
public finance is that innovating solutions while staying within the system is
the actual policy challenge that most people are not willing to take on. Mostly
because it involves exhaustive work. That is something I want to prove and by
doing so, hopefully make Narowal a model district, he said. When asked as to
what his targets for the first 12 months would be, he said, ‘I think the
initial year, we’ll need to set a direction, that would be signalling and
messaging that what kind of government would we want to run in District
Narowal. It’s clear that transparency would be at the heart of that. For which
RTI at district level is the best way to maintain transparency. The district
government should make public all information from the tendering process, to
every invoice and every receipt, we might even develop a proactive approach of
putting all this over a Website.”, he said. Talking further about his
priorities he said, "I’m keen on setting up a system for public policy to
dictate distribution of resources, I understand that politics plays a major
role by the end of the day, but I want that by the side of politics we could
involve public policy expertise. There should be a tangible matrix based on public
need to guide investment where its impact is maximum.”
Would you
believe that the government spends Rs400 million every month in salaries of
Narowal alone. Around 71 percent of this goes to education, eight percent to
health and five to agriculture. Around Rs284 million is being spent on
education and yet, the people prefer getting their children enrolled in a
private school. That is a disturbing fact which has made me setting this right
one of my major priorities. While most governments have been too focused on
urban development; our suburbs, towns, townships, and villages have developed
by themselves but in a haphazard manner. As a country we will now need to take
municipal services, like waste collection & management, sanitation to the
village level because there has been very rapid growth. Townships have become
towns, villages have grown to be townships and all new development has been
like urban development except that for municipal services.
This is
resulting in waterborne diseases and setting up groundwork for unplanned, tough
to manage cities of the future. Although a huge cricket fan himself, Ahmed
Iqbal, was wary of all investment focus being drawn to a single sport.
"Kabaddi is still the most popular sport in the most populous province of
the country. It draws around 100 times larger crowds than cricket. I believe
that setting up a National Kabaddi League would be a great initiative and I'll
try to help the cause as much as I can", he said.