Chitral: As elections have become a farce in Pakistan and more or less every candidate in every election rises to his level of corruption in one way or the other – whether buying of votes, cheating people with false promises, selling religion, tribalism, regionalism or playing on the available emotions and sentiments of people- everything but Merit is considered.
As such kind of elections being held in Pakistan since independence are harming Pakistan instead of helping it, it would be pertinent to think out of the box and device new system for selection of MNAs? MPAs and Senators. The best method is through competitive exams like NTS as being practiced for selection of employees at lower levels. If that is not possible for the time being then the next best alternative should be to publicly auction the NA, PA and Senate seats, within the constituency.
To further elaborate this idea, e.g all candidates wishing to become an MNA/MPA should offer their bids which should be open and transparent. The highest bidder within the constituency should become the? MNA and the second highest bidder should become the MPA. Similarly the highest bidder in the Senate constituency (province) should become the Senator followed by next highest bidder till all the Senate seats are filled by subsequent highest bidders in progression.? After having done that there should be open bidding between the 120 selected senators to choose the chairman and deputy chairman on same basis. Like wise for the speaker National and Provincial Assemblies.
The advantage of this system would be:
- It would be a clean and transparent system with no chance of manipulation or fudging the process.
- It will save billions of rupees and precious time for the country spent on electioneering and election process.
- ?It will add further billions of rupees to the national exchequer obtained from the auction money
- ?It will eliminate exploitation of majority illiterate and naive people of Pakistan by clever politicians, on various pretext like tribalism, regionalism and most importantly religious exploitation.
The MNAs, MPAs and Senators thus selected should be given very high protocol status but no financial powers. We have seen that in the Senate elections candidates spend crores just for the sake of status and they are not hungry for money as they already have enough. Similarly MNAs and MPAs who would have bought their seats through a legal process will be be happy with status and would not look to mint money.
Regarding the capability of thus selected MPs, we should not bother as they cannot be worse than what we get through the current election process. If a person has so much money to buy his seat he will have some acumen also, better than most puppet members of the present system, who have been elected by fooling the people and have nothing in their kitty, neither money nor capability.
The idea may sound impractical at first but there can not be a simpler solution to the existing election rubbish in Pakistan. .. CN report, 21 Apr 2018
2 thoughts on “Out of the box: Suggestion for selecting NA, PA, Senate members”
Why not? Openly auctioning of positions is better than buying votes clandestinely, telling lies, practicing hypocrisy, ballot fudging at polling stations and using all unethical measures to secure votes.
This idea has been proposed several times on the Chitral News’ editorial. I like the idea of exam for the interested candidates, not exactly the way it is proposed, but to have it as a qualifying exam for the candidacy. The subject of the exam should be ‘The Ethics of Public Service’ with professionally developed reference material which is accessible to the public. This will ensure that potential candidate meets the very basic understanding of what it means to be a public servant and its ethical and legal standards. Once a candidate passes this threshold, then the public will monitor his or her political platform and constituency expectations. The program can serve as a civil society education in the ethics of public service as well.