Afghans Demand Elected Mayors

A provision in the Afghan constitution requiring mayors to be elected has never been put into practice.

Instead of the system of directed elected mayors and municipal councils set out in Article 141 of the constitution, appointments to these posts are filled by Afghanistan’s interior ministry, subject to presidential approval.

Speakers at IWPR-organised debates in the Zabul, Khost and Kunar provinces on March 16 agreed that this system allowed officials to be selected through personal connections and bribery rather than merit.

“A mayor is currently only accountable to the government or to a particular individual, and this generates corruption,” said Hajji Mohammad Ismail Zabuli, a tribal elder in the southern province of Zabul. “If mayors are elected by the people, they will be accountable to the public and will therefore perform better.”

Zabuli claimed that senior municipal-level positions were often sold to the highest bidder.

“How we can expect real service from a mayor who buys his position?” he asked.

However, Abdul Moqim Afghan, head of the information and culture department in Zabul province, said it was too hard to hold municipal elections.

“The major problems are the lack of census information and the undefined borders between cities and districts, as well as poor public awareness of these issues,” he said, noting that some areas were too unsafe to hold elections.

“This lack of security is the most challenging problem for municipal elections,” Afghan said. “Many towns are under direct threat, and a municipality can’t work or address people’s problems when there is constant conflict.”

In Khost in the southeast of Afghanistan, Naqibullah Siyal of the Qalam NGO said the lack of accountability had far-reaching consequences.

“The majority of civil society organisations in Khost are mere puppets of [local] government, members of parliament and the provincial council,” Siyal said. “All previous mayors and the current one were selected because of their connections to powerful people. The municipality is an income source.

Hajji Alif Shah Mangal, the head of the Khost Shopkeepers’ Union, said that it was important for mayors to be elected, not appointed through “money and connections”.

“Such mayors did not value us, nor did we cooperate with them,” he said. But Mangal said the current mayor of Khost city, Keramat Khan Khpalwak, was doing a good job.

“Traders in Khost traders recommended that the current mayor… be appointed. We cooperate with him a great deal. We have hired 63 municipal workers out of our own money to help him clean up the city,” he said.

Khpalwak himself during the debate and stressed how much he had done for the city.

“I have been mayor for the last six months,” he said. “I have stopped 90 per cent of corruption in the municipality. Municipal revenues have increased by 40 per cent, and 4,000 square metres of green space and 12,000 square metres of pavement have been regenerated.”

Abdul Ghani Abbasi, the mayor of Asadabad, the administrative centre of the eastern Kunar province, appeared to favour elections.

“If the election is really based on principle, the mayor who wins will enjoy the public’s confidence,” he said.

This report is based on an ongoing series of debates conducted as part of IWPR’s Afghan Youth and Elections programme.