Malak-ul-Maluk, an alternative for the current MPs?

If cardboard and paper were edible, the poor of Kabul city could live on the posters and billboards of the parliamentary candidates of 2010 for almost a month. Most of those who voted would agree with me that it wasn’t the posters that influenced their decision to vote. Then why such a huge waste of money? And the cluttering of our own cities? I would argue the fault lies in the system itself.

Democratic institutions have to happen naturally and evolve organically for them to be effective and representative, which is not the case with the Afghan parliamentary system. It has been forced from the beginning, and after a 9 year trial period, clearly isn’t working. In the last parliament, only a handful of the MP’s ever visited their constituencies. For the majority it wasn’t possible as they feared for their lives. This lead to the alienation of the public, especially those in the rural areas, because their voices could not be reached.

The recent parliamentary elections of 2010 were a prime example of the collective failures of the past 9 years of the experiment in Western-style democracy that this country has become. There were 17.5 million eligible voters though only 4 million showed up to vote, most of them the urban population in cities. That is only 23% percent of the eligible voters leaving 77% behind– meaning further alienating them from the current Afghan government. It clearly isn’t working as it is supposed to. It is too forced and doesn’t connect well with the fibres of rural Afghan society.

The alienation of rural Afghans could have been stopped the first time if the parliament was actually a representation of the people. Voting should lead to representation of the people, not just be undertaken as part of the democratic machine. If one part of the machine doesn’t work -- in this case, the voting process and fair representation of the people, then the entire machine is broken!

The 2010 elections saw a huge number of candidates – 2,500 for 249 seats. The extravagant amount of money spent on the campaigns by corrupt candidates made the honest ones disappear as if they never existed. In addition to the money spent by the candidates, it cost the government 150 million USD which the international community paid for. What did we get by the end of it? We got a non-representative parliament full of warlords and the facilitators of corruption. The country is not able to sustain this type of false representation, and for what? It doesn’t even work!

Perhaps a better alternative would be to limit the current elections system to the cities and instead adapt the local system of malaks (informally elected village chieftains) in the rural areas into a formalized process that would result in more actual popular representations. Here’s how it would work: Each village would elect their malak, and the village malaks would collectively form a district body. The malaks of the district would then elect a malak-ul-maluk (chief of the chieftains) from amongst themselves to represent the district as a whole in the parliament. This way the MPs would really be from amongst the people, and would be connected to their constituencies; thus, serving as a direct link back to their constituencies throughout the provinces. Some districts can be coupled together based on their population and geographic size to meet the target of 249 seats in the parliament. The mix of the two systems could produce the best form of representative parliament, one that is from amongst the people, affordable and sustainable for the country, and one that would ensure effective outreach for the government. A real, representative democratic machine, home-grown in Afghanistan.