And the other maladies of urban Sindh
The Mayor is back in Baldia. He has already launched his 100 Days Programme starting from the cleanliness. Karachi offers him a great opportunity for the ‘broom photos’, the way urban Punjab does that for ‘Barish photos’ in monsoon to its leaders. But what else is left for the Mayor in the office. Almost everything is with the provincial or the federal government – Karachi Water and Sewerage Board, Sindh Solid Waste Management Board, Karachi Urban Transport Corporation and Karachi Infrastructure Development Company etc. And he has already started talking about his ‘limited authority and unlimited passion’.
With such statements, the Mayor takes us to the power equation of the city and the provincial government and then to a realpolitik question: when PPP government in the center was devolving powers from the federation to provinces, they knew they had massive gains in store for them in the times to come given their position in Sindh and the Sindhi syndrome of emotional politics. But what was Mayor’s party thinking when they were failing to strike a better deal to empower Karachi – or for that matter Hyderabad – in the new local government system in the province. Nothing much is left for their Mayor now. All he can do for the city is to show his ‘unlimited passion’.
Nothing much is left for Karachi in the city when the community has abandoned it. The apathy is such that even the resourceful, rich and the professional middle classes with global ethos are fine with living in the most expansive slums in the world. Otherwise, they are generally the ones who challenge, guide and motivate city governments and shape up the urban agenda. Even they are unable to sit together to arrange things for themselves if their beloved political parties are constantly failing on that account. Compare this with the communities in Sialkot (city infrastructure), Hunza (education) and Rabwah (community policing) just to name a few and see the direction of the community in Karachi. They are just working against themselves – even destroying their opportunities and resources instead of building them. For example, letting your massive waste water go untreated into the sea will diminish the prospects of desalination in the future to enhance capacity of municipal water.
Same is the case with other cities of Sindh. With the salient feature of poor urban governance coupled with arrogance on being the only electoral choice of the people, the ruling party doesn’t see that only about half of the urban population in Sindh (excluding Karachi) have access to low quality piped water running for 2-4 hours a day. There is only 40% coverage to garbage collection and little attention is paid to its proper disposal. There is no sewage treatment system in second tier cities. Around 60% of urban population use open sewers often blocked and making ponds of waste water. These are some of the figures on basic amenities that are quoted very often. They are going up as the time passes and Sindh ages with PPP. The same can easily be said about other cities in Pakistan but what is striking here is the constant decline in people’s contact with public offices and government functionaries to take up matters with them for redressal. Civil servants who go from Punjab or KP to serve in Sindh are appalled to see this. As the public trust wanes, the ritual in stupor continues – the rite of voting for the ruling party.
But the decay is deeper. And this has strong connections to the storm ahead. Sindh is fast losing its Maulai culture. While we fear that militant outfits are still active in southern Punjab, their vanguards are very well established in Sindh with ever increasing missions moving from town to town and ‘converting’ the believers of unity in diversity. The questions as to who was the beneficiary of the old culture (the peers and feudals) and on its repercussions have their place but the strong spirit of harmony and coexistence that this land carried throughout its history would become only a great story to tell in the centuries ahead if the current shifts are not taken seriously.
What kind of policies, resources and community alliances are required to address this and where to start with are essential questions. All we know is the fact that the gaps in trust between the government and the public are the entry points of the non-state actors. The areas where the governments fail are the key issues these groups take up to their advantage. And all we know is the fact that the ruling party in Sindh is giving them ample space to flourish and to change this land for good.
