Recently the government announced new municipalities and now their total number has reached 130. According to the source at Ministry of Federal Affairs and Local Development (MoFALD), the government is about to declare 66 more municipalities. There are opinions both for and against the recent announcement.
Critics opine that newly declared municipalities do not deserve to be urban government units as basic norms and values of municipal governance have not been found in them. They think that the government had to have built basic physical infrastructure before converting numbers of Village Development Committees into municipalities. However there are sufficient reasons to take this as the government’s commitment to planned urban development.
Urbanization is the indicator of development. Once 196 municipalities get their full shape, almost half of the total population of Nepal will reside in cities and Nepal’s identity will no longer be the country of villages only. The dream of making the country with beautiful cities will come true only if the government makes and implements concrete action plan for improved local governance because inadequate physical infrastructure is less important in comparison to lack of right governance.
Local bodies, including municipalities, are functioning in Nepal without elected representatives for the last 12 years. They are working against the fundamentals of local self governance. Principles of autonomous local government have been misinterpreted. Absence of elected representatives has turned local bodies into local government without opposition. This has led to decentralization of corruption. Given this, the voice of early local election has now become stronger.
Civil society and media have strongly advocated for the early local elections. They opine that elected representatives can only solve the problems of mismanagement and misuse of state resources at the local level. Political parties have also shown their commitment for the elections. They, however, have differences on timing for the election. UCPN (Maoist) and Madhesh-based fringe parties have stood against the election before the promulgation of the new constitution because they might be thinking that their position will become even weaker and the issue of ethnic identity-based federalism gets diluted if election is held before the promulgation of the constitution.
Local election can solve many problems in local bodies but not all of them. Various issues might remain unsolved even after the local election. Some of the obstacles to development and causes of corruption have direct bearing on the lack of democratically elected representatives while several more serious problems also exist. The government should give special attention to these problems. It should distinguish them and launch customized intervention irrespective of local elections to solve these problems.
Multiple identities of political party representatives have been a serious problem in municipalities. They represent at the meetings of local bodies and work as a part of local government, lead the user committee, work as contractors and monitor the projects putting themselves in the monitoring team. They are the most influential players in the planning, budgeting and execution of local development programs with different identity.
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But the values of politics and participatory development have been undermined by the political parties. Executive officers of some municipalities have experiences that political parties prevent the access of citizens to fiscal information. In their opinion if process related information is disclosed, their multiple identity will be exposed. Thus, political syndicate has prevented real public participation in the local development process.
Local Body Resource Mobilization and Management Guideline has been misused to institutionalize corruption. The policy of cost sharing designed to promote participation and ownership of local community on development programs of municipalities has produced adverse results. According to the guideline, it is mandatory for user groups to deposit certain percentage of project cost in advance to get matching fund from the municipalities. Misusing this provision, the contractors deposit that sum of money on behalf of user groups to funnel fund from municipalities. After the fund is released, the contractor pays commission to political representatives in a user group and builds substandard project for profit. This has almost killed the essence of user group and decentralized the corruption to the grassroots.
Locally appointed but politically motivated employees have decisive capacity in municipalities. Most of the employees including Account Officer, Engineer and Planning Officer have been locally appointed. Their appointment process is neither transparent nor merit-based. Local employees never get transferred because prevailing law does not have provision of their transfer. It is accused that they build nexus with local political parties and sometimes use such nexus for improper use of resources. Centrally appointed senior officials in many cases have also become victims of such nexus. Executive officers therefore are not capable of taking any decision independently.
Implementation of social accountability tools including public hearing, public audit and social audit have been made mandatory for municipalities to promote public oversight. However, these tools are being implemented without fulfilling basic requirements. Agendas and background information are not provided in advance to the participants. Participation is also limited. This has prevented informed and meaningful public participation in such forums.
Interestingly, chairpersons or influential members of user groups, the implementers of the local development projects take part in public audit, public hearing or social audit as beneficiaries. Information about these programs are limited to time and venue. Actual expenditure of the project, consumer group related information and other important information are not provided to participants of public hearing. Perfunctory reports of such programs have been sufficient to fulfill the formal requirement to be successful in fulfilling minimum condition and performance measurement (MCPM) and to get additional funds.
These few examples of governance deficiency in existing municipalities pose big challenge to the government. Lack of absorption capacity of municipalities, no proper mechanism to monitor the functions of consumer groups, lack of technical expertise to construct development projects, inadequate access of citizens to fiscal information, lack of training and development of local employees and poor quality of final audit are further hindrances to municipal governance. These governance problems in existing municipalities should be immediately addressed to create development friendly environment in the newly declared municipalities from the very beginning.
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