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

Present democratic rulers of Pakistan have performed a coup d'état against the first tier of democracy - local bodies government - which are completely dysfunctional, he said and added that what an irony that those who beat the trumpets of democracy prior to elections strangled democracy as soon as they came into the government.

Kamal said that on the one hand, Prime Minister Imran Khan is making empty promises of a strong local government system to the nation while the fact is he has deactivated the local government set up during his two and a half years of government in center, 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 also said that PML-N Chief Nawaz Sharif whose favourite slogan is 'Mujhe kyun nikala' "Why did you oust me" on a daily basis, never once raised his voice of "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. Whereas the present government is not holding local bodies elections in Punjab because it knows the fact that it will lose the local bodies elections in Punjab.

The PSP chairman expressed these views while addressing separate video link meetings with PSP Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa office bearers. Kamal further said that local governments in KPK and Balochistan have been dysfunctional and being governed by bureaucrats. Following the federal government, the Sindh government has also crippled the local government system and is not serious about holding local bodies' elections.

Billions of rupees worth of development work that was supposed to be done through elected local bodies representatives is now being done through bureaucracy, not only leading to rampant corruption but also these bureaucrats are not accountable to the public.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020