A recent exchange with Syed Mustafa Kamal, Federal Minister for National Health Services, made me revisit an aspect of my recent article in The Friday Times, A Presidential Republic, Devolved To The People. I have written elsewhere about Article 140A and meaningful local government, but Kamal made a pertinent observation about this particular article: if devolution is central to the argument, the constitutional vulnerability of local government deserved more explicit treatment.

His point was straightforward. Article 140A requires the provinces to establish elected local governments and devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to them. Yet the provision is brief. It does not define the essential functions of local government, give the Provincial Finance Commission the constitutional standing enjoyed by the National Finance Commission, or establish an enforceable fiscal entitlement for local bodies.

In Kamal’s view, this leaves too much room for provincial governments and, in practice, chief ministers to determine how much devolution actually occurs. He argues for clearer constitutional definition of local-government powers and for fiscal arrangements under which the local share cannot effectively be withheld by the province. His suggestion that resources should reach local governments without provincial discretion in his present formulation, directly from the Federation invites constitutional debate. But it would be a mistake to treat the proposal merely as an encroachment upon provincial autonomy. One has first to understand where it comes from.

Kamal’s position is not an impulsive response to my article. In 2021 he argued publicly that Article 140A did not adequately define local-government responsibilities and powers and that resources needed to reach the union-council level. In early 2022, amid controversy over local government in Sindh, he called for a formula-based PFC mechanism so districts would not have to “beg” the province for their financial share. That history matters because constitutional debates are shaped by institutional memory. When the same tier expected to devolve power also controls the law defining that devolution, many municipal departments and the money required to perform their functions, suspicion is hardly surprising. If powers can be withheld, reclaimed, fragmented among provincial agencies or rendered ineffective through financial dependence, demands for guarantees beyond ordinary provincial discretion become understandable.

This is more than political impatience. It is a trust deficit produced by the structure itself. Kamal’s present position can therefore be read as a synthesis of years of incomplete........

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