The PPP/C appears set upon a course of outdoing the PNC in negative accomplishments. Local elections have been held at sporadic intervals: 1959 then 1970, not again until 1994 and not since then. So there is no rush: the PPP/C has about 5 more years before it will surpass the PNC’s record of some 24 years between local government elections!
In any case, notwithstanding the public outcry, in my view we should not rush to these elections for a more substantial reason. Our experience with the sorts of governance reforms that are required before such elections can meaningfully take place has been, to say the least, very mixed. For example, at the general level our attempt at constitutional reform about a decade ago has left so many dissatisfied that they still pejoratively refer to the outcome of that effort as the “Burnham constitution” to suggest that not much of substance was changed! At the specific level, we created arrangements that make it all but impossible for us to appoint the nation’s leading legal officials, we unwittingly created an elections commission that appears permanent, we (the political party elites) constitutionalised an electoral plurality system that is totally unsuited for our a country, and we constitutionalised important commissions without being able to operationalise them!
Even more importantly, we continue to blame each other without recognising that the root of the problem is only marginally related to our self-interested politicians. Nowhere in our universe are politicians saints: the way to thwart them is to properly appreciate one’s concrete conditions and put
