The existing 753 local bodies got elected in three phases in June 2017. As per the current federalized Constitution of Nepal, they have been vested with exclusive jurisdiction over 22 different areas of governance ranging from municipal police to health and education, preservation and development of local language, culture, fine arts, and concurrent jurisdiction in over 15 more such areas.
Local bodies today remain one of the most powerful local governance institutions equipped with constitutionally provided authority to improve almost all facets of the life of the local citizenry.
Dysfunction characterizing the local bodies remains a conundrum that, as will be explained below, directly results from the shoddy nature of Nepal’s current breed of politicians and their populist shenanigans.
However, paradoxical as it may sound, even after over a year and half of having come into existence, the local bodies continue to lean helplessly on the central government to depute necessary officials to render them functional. Such a sorry state of local bodies seriously questions their autonomy under the federal arrangement.
Dysfunction characterizing the local bodies remains a conundrum that, as will be explained below, directly results from the shoddy nature of Nepal’s current breed of politicians and their populist shenanigans.
To begin with, the restructuring of the local bodies has been delinked from the rich and long history we have in Nepal. For instance, the first nationwide network of local bodies, then called Panchayats-village, Nagar, district and zonal — were laid down as long back as 1962 under the then party-less Panchayat. Steady reforms continued on it based on administrative experiences such as the abolition of the Zonal Panchayats and widening of the electorate for the election of Village Panchayats to better represent the grassroots.
Unfortunately, the Panchas became obscenely corrupt and arrogant that they seemed to take corruption as their birthright due to the fact the unique political system that earned fame internationally depended on their sole support at all levels.
Since the country was getting nowhere, new legislation on decentralization came into effect in 1982. The legislation introduced the novel institution of user groups at the grassroots. These groups were exclusive organizations of the users of a given infrastructure or service, with full authority to plan, implement and continuously manage them.
The new policy required that all government grants were to be handed over directly to the user groups, thus depriving the Panchas of the authority to handle the money and the opportunity to skim some of it. It was premised that the user groups, in their collective enlightened self-interest, would prioritize the proper execution of the intended development projects without misappropriating the precious development grants.
However, since Nepalese society and its political culture remained staunchly feudal, the user group, too, were hijacked by the ubiquitous feudal forces at all levels of governance in the country.
The nationwide network of FUGs helped Nepal to recover its forest wealth that was destroyed over a period of 30 years beginning 1957, in a mere decade’s time.
Following the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990, there has been no effort to fend off the negative influence of the feudal forces on them, primarily because most leaders themselves like under the Panchayat system came from the ranks of the feudal elites in the country.
That said, however, when the Panchayat system was still around, two more user-owned institutions were introduced in Nepal that have gone on to make a major difference in the life and economy of the people even as they earned widespread plaudits for Nepal at the world stage too.
These two institutions have been the Forest User Groups (FUG) and mothers’ groups, both introduced in 1988, the former numbering more than 19,000 and the latter more than 52,000 all across the country at present.
The nationwide network of FUGs helped Nepal to recover its forest wealth that was destroyed over a period of 30 years beginning 1957, in a mere decade’s time.
Similarly, while the mothers’ groups and their female community health volunteers not only help Nepal in successfully promoting the access of women and children to basic health care in the communities, they also helped Nepal to emerge as the top performer in the attainment of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals in child survival and maternal mortality rate reduction in the world that concluded in 2015.
This long history of the evolution of local bodies in Nepal shows that when the institutions are user-owned at the grassroots, they are effective and deliver on the needs and aspirations of the people whereas those “elected” institutions at higher echelons have been historically corrupt whether they be Panchayat era district Panchayats or the VDC and municipalities of the post 1990 multiparty dispensation.
There is a sociological equation at work in the success of the grassroots user institutions. Since all the direct users of a certain service or asset, as in the case of the local forest or health services, are members of those organizations with formal authority to participate in their decision making, they are fully empowered to protect their stakes.
This has made the management of those user organizations highly transparent with all the rich and poor or high caste low caste members fully informed on the functioning of the organization. This has forced their leaders to remain accountable to the members. And it is this very user empowering equation that was conspicuously absent in the workings of the VDCs or the earlier village and district Panchayats.
Given such lessons of history, the recent structuring of the local bodies under the new federal system amounts to nothing less than the proverbial jumping from frying pan into the fire. While the erstwhile local bodies numbered around 4,000 in their heyday and were thus quite close to their communities, they remained corrupt in lack of empowered users.
The sad part of this story is that even the so-called ‘experts’ were complicit in this historic let down of the nation. By failing to learn from this rich history of local bodies in Nepal, they have clearly forfeited their qualification to be called ‘experts’.
But our new “federal” politicians who origin from among the ranks of the feudal elites in the village communities and are corrupt too, have reduced the number of local bodies to nearly one-fifth of what existed, thus making them five times more distant from the people and potentially aggravating the problems of lack of transparency and accountability.
However, even as these politicians are corrupt and irresponsible doing grievous wrong to the nation, they have further demonstrated their foolhardiness and mindlessness by belching out the misleading slogan that current model of federalism is about “Bringing Singha Durbar to the Communities.”
As the media reports have it, most of the heads of these new local bodies come from the ranks of the construction contractors who alone had the money to “buy” nomination tickets from various parties and spend stupendous sums of money to get elected.
The average cost of getting elected as Gaupalika (Village Municipality) chief was one 10 million rupees, and the cost for being elected as ward chairman was two million rupees, as per media reports.
The sad part of this story is that even the so-called ‘experts’ were complicit in this historic let down of the nation. By failing to learn from this rich history of local bodies in Nepal, they have clearly forfeited their qualification to be called ‘experts’.
This new structure is thus loaded with the potential for utter mismanagement and misappropriations of resources in their bid to recover their investment in getting elected as local bodies’ heads and members. The media is already replete with reports of misuse of authority and embezzlement of funds in various provinces.
At this point, we need to understand the reason behind the reluctance of civil servants to move to the deputed location. While most politicians go scot-free following massive corruption, those are the government officials who get caught and punished.
Although this is not the whole story in the reluctance of the government officials to be deputed to the local bodies, this certainly counts as the major factor at play in this regard. The local bodies will never deliver in their present form and therefore, must be restructured once again according to the lessons of our long experience in this country.
(The author is former government Secretary)
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Khabarhub’s editorial stance.
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