A constitution can promise power to the citizen and still arrange for that power to be intercepted long before it arrives. Article 140A of our Constitution is that promise. It runs to forty-one words. It instructs every province to establish local government and to devolve political, administrative, and financial authority to elected representatives. It then states nothing about how long those representatives sit, how soon they must be elected again, or what stops a province from dissolving them on a whim. The promise was drafted as a doorway. It has been used as a trapdoor. The irony is almost too neat to be accidental.
The Eighteenth Amendment and Its Unfulfilled Promise
The Eighteenth Amendment was sold as the end of the centralising state. Power would leave Islamabad and reach the provinces, and the provinces would govern themselves. They did. Sixteen years on, the same provinces that demanded autonomy from the centre have refused to pass a single layer of it downward. Local government, the one-tier government a citizen can actually walk into, has become what lawyers call a creature of provincial law. It lives or dies at the pleasure of the body directly above it.
History should have warned us. In Pakistan, it is military regimes that have built (and tried to heavily rely on) local governments, from Ayub's Basic Democracies to Musharraf's devolution plan, because a dictator with no party needs a grassroots base to stand on. Elected governments do the opposite. They see an empowered mayor as a rival and starve him.
Provincial Control and Parallel Bodies
The defenders of the provinces will argue that local government is a provincial subject, theirs to design. That is true. It is also the problem. A subject you may design at will is a subject you may dismantle at will. Look at how the dismantling is done. Across the four provinces and the federal capital sit at least fourteen major parallel bodies, development agencies, water boards and building control authorities, which perform the core work of a city while answering only to the provincial executive. The Lahore Development Authority plans Lahore. The Karachi Water and Sewerage Board provides water to Karachi. The elected mayor cuts ribbons. In Imrana Tiwana, the courts confronted exactly this: an authority running a city the Constitution had handed to its council. The mayor holds the title. The province holds the city.
Financial Strangulation of Local Governments
Then comes the money, and the money is where the intent shows most clearly. The National Finance Commission moves resources from the centre to the provinces on a fixed and binding formula. The Provincial Finance Commissions, which are meant to do the same for local governments, sit dormant or captured. In Balochistan, the commission has not met since 2008. The officers who run a district must answer to the elected mayor, not arrive on deputation with their loyalty already filed in the provincial secretariat. In Sindh, transfers to local governments fell from 15.7 per cent of provincial receipts to 5.8 per cent. Worse, a local tax must travel up to the provincial fund before any of it travels back. A council that taxes its own people and watches the proceeds vanish upward soon stops taxing them. The incentive to govern has been quietly switched off.
The bureaucracy completes the design. When a council is dissolved or its term lapses, the deputy commissioner steps in as administrator, and the elected tier simply disappears into a filing cabinet. Punjab parked its municipal services in fifty-six provincial companies. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa deleted the powers of its mayors from the statute and replaced them with authority "as may be prescribed by rules", until the Peshawar High Court struck the amendment down in 2025. The Supreme Court has done its share, voiding the sections of Sindh's law that let the province seize any municipal function it fancied. The courts keep rescuing local government. They should not have to keep being asked.
The Real Incentive: Provincial vs. Local Power
None of this is incompetence. It is an incentive. A member of a provincial assembly and an effective mayor are competing for the same development budget and the same credit with the same voters. One of them controls the law. He has used it.
Proposed Fixes for Genuine Devolution
The fix is not an appeal for political will. It is a set of mechanisms. Local government needs its own chapter in the Constitution, not a single residual clause. It needs a fixed four-year term and a hard ninety-day window for elections after a term ends, the same discipline Article 224 imposes on the assemblies. It needs protection from the assemblies themselves, so that a local government law cannot be repealed without a two-thirds majority. The Provincial Finance Commission must be constitutionalised on the model of Article 160, with mandatory awards and a guaranteed share of the provincial pool, a quarter of it at the very least. The district committees that let provincial legislators capture local development funds must be abolished outright. The officers who run a district must answer to the elected mayor, not arrive on deputation with their loyalty already filed in the provincial secretariat. And the mayor must be elected by the citizens directly, not appointed afterwards through council bargaining.
There is a simple test for whether a state believes in federalism or merely enjoys it. A federalist passes power down even when it costs him. For years, the provinces argued, correctly, that a true federation does not hoard authority at the top. They won the argument. They were handed the Eighteenth Amendment. Then they turned around and built, for their own districts, the exact centralised system they had spent decades condemning. A province that will not be a federation to its own people has no business calling Islamabad to account.
