PESHAWAR: Local bodies’ representatives on Friday postponed their ongoing protest for four days, and announced to resume the agitation from January 1 with more ‘strength’ if the government didn’t allocate funds for them.

Hundreds of local government representatives, under the banner of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Local Council Association, continued their protest for the second day on Friday.

A large number of mayors, chairmen of the city and tehsil governments and chairmen of village and neighbourhood councils blocked the busy Khyber Road, the main thoroughfare of the provincial capital.

The protesters chanted slogans against the provincial government and Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur over denial of funds.

Postpone ongoing agitation till Jan 1

Before coming to the road, members of the tehsil and village and neighbourhood councils, mostly from opposition parties, gathered at the Jinnah Park. They later marched on the GT Road and reached the Khyber Road, where they staged a sit-in outside the provincial assembly’s building.

Addressing the protesters, president of Local Council Association and Mardan city mayor Himayatullah Mayar said that since the formation of the local governments three years ago, the provincial government had not released a single penny out of their due share of Rs120 billion.

“According to the Local Government Act 2013, the government is bound to release 20 per cent of the total funds of Annual Development Programme (ADP), to the local bodies,” he said. However, he regretted that government had failed to implement this part of the law.

He asked the elected representatives to go to their hometowns and convince their voters about the ‘injustices’ with them. He said that they would resume their protest on January 1 along with their voters in large numbers.

Mr Mayar said that the local bodies were established for empowering people at the grassroots level. “The local government representatives held four meetings with the chief minister and members of his cabinet, who also agreed to fulfill the protesters’ demands, but to no avail,” he said.

Mr Mayar said that the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had voted the PTI to power for serving them and not “looting” the funds meant for development activities.

He warned that their protest would be more aggressive if the government didn’t meet their demand by January 1.

Meanwhile, chairman of Trakha village council in Nowshera Taimur Kamal told Dawn that the protest would continue until their demands were met.

The major demands of the protesting LG representatives include the implementation of the Local Government Act in letter and spirit and framing of the LG Rules of Business in line with Section 112 of the LG Act, 2019.

They also demanded of the government to immediately release the outstanding allocated funds to the local bodies under the Provincial Finance Commission Award for the fiscal years from 2021-22 to 2024-25, and provide the LG representatives with offices, funds, powers and other amenities.

It merits a mention here that on Wednesday, the KP government had withdrawn Rs3.6 billion funds it had “released” to the tehsil governments on Dec 5, apparently due to the chief minister’s displeasure with the finance department for not adhering to his directives that the money be given away to the ruling PTI-backed councils only.

The finance department in a letter addressed to the deputy commissioners of 29 districts said that in pursuance of the chief minister’s directives, the authorisation of development funds released to the District Accounts-IV on Dec 5 had been withdrawn.

The government had released Rs3.2 billion to 51 tehsil councils out of 131, and Rs372 million to the six tehsils of the merged districts on Dec 5.

The development funds were released to the tehsil chairmen affiliated with PTI, ignoring those aligned with the opposition parties.

Following the release of funds, which had mostly gone to the ruling party-affiliated mayors and tehsil chairpersons, opposition parties decried the discrimination and staged a protest outside the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi. The protest was meant to inform incarcerated PTI founder Irman Khan about his party’s ‘discrimination’ in the release of funds.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2024