Civil society activists have demanded immediate Local Government (LG) elections in the Punjab.In a roundtable conference organised by Baidarie Sialkot, an NGO, at a local hotel on Tuesday, they said that the LG elections had completed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan, except for Quetta and Gwadar.
They said that the LG elections in four divisions of Sindh were going to be held on June 26 while Islamabad would hold the LG elections on July 31. The only province where the LG elections were nowhere in sight was the Punjab, they added. They called for more representation for women, transgenders and persons with special abilities in the LG polls.
The suggestions that came up in the conference would be sent to the government, which had formed a committee to oversee the LG law. The 30-member committee comprises 29 men and a woman. In 2015 LG elections, only one woman was elected on youth seat in Lahore while there were 273 union councils in the city.
Zahid Islam, Sangat Development Foundation Executive Director an expert on Local Government, demanded the LG elections in a month. He said that Article 140A of the Constitution binds the provinces to have local governments while Article 32 gives special representation to peasants, workers and women. “Give the Local Government to the elected representatives. The commissioners and assistant commissioners already have a lot of responsibilities,” Islam said.
Mubeenuddin Qazi advocate, another expert on LG, asked the civil society to hold a roundtable conference of political leaders to build a consensus like the Supreme Court Bar Association did in Balochistan. “Without building a consensus on law, the law won’t be effective. And, it is important to first have a law and then hold elections,” Qazi stressed.
Bushra Khaliq of Women in Struggle for Empowerment pointed out that SDG 5.5 was about social and financial empowerment of women, which was done by providing them with an enabling environment.
