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Privatising democracy

Successive democratic governments, the incumbents more strenuously than the former, have pushed the process of privatisation of industry and commerce in Pakistan. One does believe however, that greater priority should have been given to “privatising” democracy. In real terms, no segment of the government is under private sector control, except maybe at the Prime Minister’s or Chief Minister’s level and that too only in those parts (such as allocating plots and rural lands) which are so designated by our bureaucratic rulers. Unless and until we denationalise and decentralize democracy from the grassroots level upwards, the fact of power being in the hands of the people is a continuing farce with which we are happily fooling ourselves.

Power is firmly in the hands of those bureaucrats who control the purse strings of the public exchequer, i.e. they judge how the money has to be spent, thus allocate it and then mis-spend the same without fear of accountability. At the level of the Union, Municipality or further upwards, is there any elected politician who is free of a Controller in the form of a bureaucrat? While Auditors must be designated to ensure that our politicians do not spend all the public money on Pajeros and Nissan Patrol vehicles, the authority for financial sanctions (and the disbursement thereof) must be totally vested in the elected representatives. The public being painfully aware that their representatives are mere window-dressing and have no fiscal authority, the mass psychology will continue to accept bureaucrats as the real rulers.

Democracy will remain a sham unless we take the power of sanctioning funds away from bureaucracy and give it to those elected by the people. Only by the genuine “privatising” of democracy can we expect that the aspirations of the people of this country will be assuaged.

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