Is Relief on Hand for Karachi or Is It another Con Game?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
Imran Khan, known for playing on the front foot as captain of Pakistan’s cricket team, took all the time in the world to ‘rush’ to the rain-deluged Karachi.
A democratically-elected leader in a Western polity taking more than two weeks to visit the commercial heart of his country would have met his political Waterloo, instantly. But in Pakistan’s feudal milieu such omissions are of little or no consequence. They can always be finessed, as is the case with IK not showing up for more than two weeks to commiserate with the people of Karachi for living through a nightmare of hellish proportions.
In the end IK descended on Karachi on September 5 laden with a package of goodies for its rain-beleaguered people. According to its much-hyped billings, it’s the largest relief package ever, of 1.1 Trillion Rupees, in the history of Pakistan.
The grandiloquent package, unveiled by the title of Karachi Transformation Plan (KTP) is, no doubt, mammoth. The mere sound byte of 1.1 trillion is impressive enough to knock any mortal off their feet. IK, in his well-orchestrated and choreographed press conference from the cozy comfort of Karachi’s Governor’s House, also grandly rubbed in his message that all the relief and development work entailed in the ‘package’ will be completed within the remaining three years of his stint in power.
That electoral expediency woven into the matrix of the ‘package’ is quite obvious. Which isn’t something that should be held against IK. Political leaders, especially those with ambition to get re-elected, are entitled to make the best of an opportunity that could enhance their chances at the polls. So, none should begrudge IK if he seeks to make political capital for himself whenever the people of Karachi, in particular, get an opportunity to exercise their political will next. His intent to earn brownie points from this relief package for a devastated and badly mauled city is kosher, in terms of cold political reality.
The package, in terms of optics, has all the ingredients of relief at a massive level for Karachi—a city suffering from decades of criminal neglect from power-holders. It addresses all the essential elements of what’s badly needed to pull the city out of the pits where lax rulers and vengeful and myopic potentates have driven it over long, long years.
In its multi-faceted dimensions, the package aims to simultaneously address all those major sectors that have been the bane of the people of Karachi for decades. These are: clean drinking water supplied in pipes and not from tankers in the clutches of its notorious tanker-mafia; clearing up of its long-clogged rain-water drains or ‘nullahs’; collection of thousands of tons of solid waste produced by a population of 22 million dumped, for years, in sewers and drains; rehabilitation of its long-dysfunctional transport system which has long been a curse and nightmare for its people. Last, but not least important, the package aims at setting up a unity of command, or something close to it, to address the various ills and myriad civic problems of the mega-city constructively.
This last factor, unity of command, is crucial in the context of Karachi’s balkanized administration. The city is like a beehive of authorities, with each authority working in its own little patch with no concern whether its administration of a service is delivering to people’s expectations or not. Turf wars are order of the day with each authority jealously guarding its turf and often poaching on others. It has so many cantonment boards, so many ‘authorities’ for water, waste disposal, land management, et al. But in all this patch-work, nightmarish scenario what’s most conspicuous by its absence is any commitment to live up to their job obligation.
So, on the face of it, the package would deliver Karachi out of the quagmire where it has been marooned for decades because no government at the center—since Ayub Khan’s era—has had any serious concern to mitigate the unstinted suffering of its people. As for the provincial government, Sindh and its capital, Karachi, have been under the PPP rule for well over 12 years. But Karachi’s woes have compounded, exponentially, under the kleptocrats of PPP whose sole motive in power has been none other than making hay while the sun shines for them.
The Sindh government is a hand-maiden of Asif Ali Zardari, whose notoriety for corruption has long transcended the geographical confines of Pakistan. Inspired by his example, and patronage, Sindh’s notorious ‘Waderashahi’ has taken loot and plunder to heights never before seen in Pakistan. Some of Karachi’s myriad ‘mafias’ have been plundering and pulverizing the city and its inhabitants with impunity because they enjoy the blessings of Zardari.
So, while Imran Khan may have had his moments of glory in unveiling this master plan for Karachi’s rehabilitation and revival of its long-eclipsed glory, he may have, simultaneously, sowed the seed of its death before birth by putting Sindh’s Chief Minister, Murad Ali Shah—a factotum of Zardari’s—at the head of the co-ordination committee that will be overseeing the implementation and execution of the grand scheme.
Putting a minion of Zardari in charge of Karachi’s grand revival program is akin to putting a wolf in charge of a sheep’s herd: all the sheep will have been devoured before reaching their destination. PPP stalwarts, in their appearances at TV talk-shows, have nonchalantly quipped about the going rate of ‘commission’, a euphemism for corruption and loot, on contracts and projects floated by the government. The rate, according to them, could be anywhere from 10 percent to as much as 50 percent.It’s not hard to imagine that mouths must already be salivating in the laissez-faire Sindh Government.
The crux of Karachi’s woes is that corrupt politicians have regularly skimmed off billions of rupees from public projects, which has rendered projects incomplete and, by its token, unresponsive to the needs of the people. The need of the hour, and the gravity of the mess created in Karachi by thieving governments, is to completely delink all and every project of development and rehabilitation of the city’s badly-mauled infrastructure from politicians.
In other words, Karachi needs—and the precarious nature of its messed-up infrastructure makes it an ineluctable requirement—a non-political, technically and professionally competent administrator to run the show. Any role for bone-corrupt politicos will render the revival scheme still-born.
But corrupt politicians of Sindh are pugnaciously determined to keep themselves right at the heart of Imran’s KTP. They have triggered a war of words with Islamabad even before the ink on IK’s plan would dry up.
First, Murad Ali Shah has lost no time in appointing an ethnic Sindhi bureaucrat, with no links with Karachi and with no inkling of its myriad problems as the new ‘Administrator’ of Karachi in place of the outgoing, and elected, mayor of the city. He’s making no bones about his intent to dutifully wield an ethnic Sindhi card, something that his master Zardari would do whenever his corruption trail gets too hot for him to handle.
Murad Ali Shah’s blatant thumbing of nose at IK has understandably enraged the MQM leadership. MQM is IK’s coalition partner in government and IK should be sensitive to his partners being fingered by PPP in Karachi. The MQM leader, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui has denounced the Sindh CM’s deliberate provocation in no uncertain terms.
Squabbling over the center-provincial contribution to the package has already started in right earnest. IK’s contention that Islamabad will be shouldering the lion’s burden of the package—to the tune of 62 % of the cost—has been challenged by Bilawal Bhutto, PPP’s ‘accidental chairman. BB claims that 800 billion rupees of the total 1,100 billion will be chipped in by the provincial government.
Bilawal’s claim has been swiftly rebutted by Shibli Faraz, IK’s Information Minister, who put his finger where it must hurt Zardari’s minions by quipping that PPP can’t count above 10 percent—a crack at Don Zardari’s global reputation of ‘Mr.Ten Percent’.
This favorite pastime of Pakistani politicians, i.e. point-scoring, triggered by Zardari’s loyalists should give a clue to the PPP agenda to sabotage IK’s grand scheme for Karachi by whatever means. They have thrown IK a gauntlet. How he chooses to tackle the challenge remains to be seen.
What both PTI and PPP seem to ignore, inadvertently or intentionally, is the elephant in the room: the role in the supposed transformation of their city of the people of Karachi. They have suffered enormously, without succor from any quarters, over 12 long years of PPP’s waderashahi, which has plundered their city’s resources with impunity. Their lives have been degraded and dishonored in the turf wars among various stake-holders of our political landscape. The recent rains have not only exposed, beyond any shred of doubt, the gross incompetence of their city’s robber-barons masquerading as rulers but should also have sounded a wakeup call for them. They have to get on their toes and take charge of the city they live in.
The people of Karachi can take charge of their own city by donning the mantle of watchdogs over the implementation of all the schemes kicked off by IK’s KTP. The recent demonstration by well-to-do inhabitants of Karachi’s up-scale DHA, outside the offices of Clifton Cantonment Board, could be the opening gambit in the Karachiites’ long overdue resolve to take the bull of their myriad cosmopolitan afflictions by its horns. That should become a beacon for onward vigilante role for the people of Karachi in their long pursuit to call the bluffs of this or that political and vested interest mafias defacing their city and making their lives miserable. The time for them is now to chase the con masters out of their city and their lives.
Whichever way the chips may fall in the coming months and years—three years, to be exact according to the architects of IK’s ambitious KTP—over the implementation of all that’s being touted as the dawn of a new life for tens of millions of Karachi’s denizens, it will most certainly impact IK’s future as the leader of Pakistan. In setting himself up against Karachi’s long and deeply-entrenched political and vested-interest mafias, IK may have gambled too much and bitten more than what he could chew. Will he and his confidants have the grit and resolve to parry the mafias’ backlash will show his mettle. The unfolding spectacle will be worth all the thrills and excitements it promises to have.
- K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
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