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Why a Weak and Fragmented Parliament…?

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Why a Weak and Fragmented Parliament…?

As a democratic and formal political system, the government of Afghanistan is comprised of national assembly, executive and judiciary, each with distinctive and specialized responsibilities. The National Assembly tends to be, "the highest legislative organ" manifesting the will of people and representing the entire nation. (Afghanistan's Constitution 2004) However, despite the constitutional emphasis and public expectations, Afghanistan's National Assembly remains structurally weak, practically impotent and politically fragmented.

In order to understand the role of national assembly, its obligations and current status in political arena of Afghanistan, it is important to get familiar with NA's constitutional obligations and structure. According to Afghanistan's current constitution, the NA consists of two houses: House of people and House of Elders.

Members of house of people [parliament or Wolesi Jirga] are elected by the people through free, general, secret and balloting and are accountable to their constituencies. The first post-Taliban parliament in Afghanistan was inaugurated in 2005, and was commended as a significant move to complete the three branches of a democratic government.

The combination of new parliament was truly reflecting the heterogeneous ethnic, social and political structure of Afghanistan. MPs from liberal modernists, party proponents, ex-Mujahideen, religious scholars, fundamentalist Taliban sympathizers, journalists, pilots and Television personalities scored seats in the house. (Larson 2010)

Afghanistan did have parliaments or Wolesi Jirga in the past and during the monarchy rule, but the new NA envisioned in constitution 2004 was widely different from the previous ones and had more authority and independence. Therefore, legitimate expectation was generated that the new house will be a strong, effective and viable legislative arm of government in performing legislative duties and supervising the executive section. However, the experience of first and second parliaments has proved contrary to those primary expectations.

There have been various challenges impeding the Wolesi Jirga both in the first round and now. The most important among them are: A) Lack of a binding system to keep MPs accountable to their constituencies B) Election System or SNTV C) Executive Body's pressure and the imbalanced power between executive and legislative.

As mentioned earlier in this writing, members of Wolesi Jirga are directly elected by people proportional to population density in every province, therefore, MPs need to undergo heavy battle and election campaign to win public support and vote. During the election, candidates make strong commitments and promises to people in return for their support. But once the election is over, there is not a transparent and binding system to maintain the inter-relationship between MPs and their supporters.

Given the uncertain political circumstances in Afghanistan, many MPs think that their seat in parliament is a one-timed chance that most probably will happen in their life, and therefore, they need to take maximum advantages for themselves and their family members.

The effectiveness of parliament is maintained only if MPs decide to remain fully independent and committed to their promises and constitutional obligations, especially the core ones like "approving the budget, development programs, creating or abrogating administrative units and most importantly, accepting or rejecting the President's nominees for ministries and other senior positions."

The parliament's constitutional duties like deciding on ministerial nominees provide chance for interaction between both executive and legislative bodies, and this is normally the time that many MPs fail to maintain constitutional conviction. For instance, MPs need to vote on each minister-designate after hearing their speeches and plans for future in respective ministries.

If they are convinced that the candidate is well-qualified, they should approve, if not, should reject him/her. But in real world, this criterion is not necessarily respected. The minister-designates can easily enter into a secret-deal with MPs through giving them money or providing jobs for their relatives to secure their support and votes, because the voting system is held in complete secrecy, MPs have no fear to publicly criticize a candidate and implicitly support him.

(The Wolesi Jirga in Flux, 2010, Elections and Instability I Semptember 2010) In the absence of a functioning system that can impose voters' supervision on MPs, there can be many chances for corruption as unqualified people can easily occupy senior executive positions while parliament will not be able to supervise them. Lack of such a system is not only leading to corruption in approving the appointment or rejection of presidential nominees, but also in passing or abrogating laws and legislative decrees.

The second most important impediment that undermines the NA, especially Wolesi Jirga, is Afghanistan's flawed election system which intentionally neglects the formation of strong and broadly-represented political parties. MPs for the parliament are elected through Single Non-Transferrable Voting System (SNTV) which focuses more on individual-promotion than political parties.

Based on this system, whoever gets a slight majority will be elected, discarding balanced regional or political representation. In this system, candidates do not need to affiliate themselves to political parties and can decide to run independently.SNTV is diminishing the will to form a strong representative party that can bring fragmented Afghans to single platform.

The formation of parliament of MPs with individual agenda will lead to fragmentation and ambiguity of political allegiance. A true democracy is incomplete without strong political parties that have well-articulated and clearly formulated political agenda and strategy.

In fact, the presence of political parties with competitive political agenda is what that injects legitimacy and effectiveness to democratic governments. Shokria barakzai, an MP for both periods, said that weakness of political parties was the biggest obstacle for legislative.

She added, "Democracy will not gain a foothold in Afghanistan without parties." (KHALATBARI September 2010) One advantage of having strong political parties is clarity of political direction and environment in a country. Because different parties have different programs, ideology and priorities and candidates come from those parties, people and voters can easily make a decision who to support and what to expect them.

Since the decision is made by party members in compliance to party's ideology, there is less chance for corruption and misdoing. The current fragmentation in Afghan parliament clearly underlines the need for having political parties.

For instance, the line between "opposition" and "pro-government" MPs is narrowly defined and MPs are not obliged by any means to clearly declare their political opinions and position. Under such unclear circumstance, the opportunist MPs simply decide to remain neutral waiting to exchange their political allegiance to monetary or other advantages.

Therefore, the House's formal session is wasted sometimes on repetitive or unnecessary bills or issues without being able to reach consensus. Afghanistan's current constitution is attempting to draw a clear line between NA and Executive, but it fails to provide both with proportional power and authority to prevent exploitation of one party by other.

For instance, according to the constitution, one of the three special authorities of Wolesi Jirga is to accept or reject the presidential nominees for ministries which is a very important authority, but the constitution does not mention any enforcing mechanism that what will happen or should happen if Executive refuses to accept parliament's decision on this specific issue. There are enough cases where the executive simply ignored the authority of Wolesi Jirga.

For instance, when in 2007, the parliament cast a no-confidence vote for Dr. Spanta when he was minister of Foreign Affairs, the President did not accept this decision and Spanta continued to remain as Minister for another two years without having the parliament's confidence.

In May 2009, the parliament declared that it will not accept any international treaty signed by Spanta including the treaty on exchange of prisoners with UAE, but even this warning did not affect the minister. (SAMAD No. 04 & 05/2009)This was not only neglecting the parliament's constitutional authority but also discouraging MPs and their supporters for not being taken seriously in political decision-making.

Spanta was not the only case of confrontation, there are many more examples like when President Karzai's cabinet candidates were rejected by parliament, and he appointed the rejected members as acting ministers who continue to lead the ministries for indefinite period without having the approval of parliament. The fact that Afghan constitution does not require the approval of parliament for appointment of government's junior employees is placing the house in a disadvantageous position.

The executive's leverage in second parliament is stronger than the first one. From the very beginning, the government expressed dissatisfaction with the house's structure and members. The charges of electoral frauds against various members and formation of Special Electoral Tribunal was politically-motivated attempt to discredit the new house and warn its new members to comply with government's policies. The combinations of political, constitutional and structural shortfalls have contributed to Afghan parliament's ineffectiveness and failure to accomplish its legislative goals.

Ali Raza Sarwari is the permanent writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at outlookafghanistan@gmail.com

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