When rainwater enters a street, a sewer overflows, garbage remains uncollected, or drinking water stops flowing, an ordinary citizen rarely thinks of Parliament, a provincial secretariat, or a ministry. He looks for someone closer, someone he knows, someone whose door he can knock on. Very often, that person is his elected local representative.

This simple relationship explains something fundamental about democracy. Governments may formulate policies in capitals, but people experience governance where they live. For them, the State is not merely the Constitution, Parliament or a government office. It is also the clean street outside their home, water reaching their tap, the functioning school in their neighbourhood, drainage after heavy rain, and the public representative who listens when something goes wrong.

This is why elected local representatives may rightly be described as the real parliamentarians of everyday life. Their parliament is the neighbourhood. Their constituents do not need an appointment to tell them that a streetlight has stopped working, a drain is blocked, or a family has been left without a basic service. They meet people in markets, on streets, at community gatherings, and sometimes at their own doors. They hear public problems before those problems become official files or statistics. Local representatives are, in this sense, the first responders of democracy.

This idea has long been recognised internationally. Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon observed that just as politics is........

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