- Politics instead of action
Karachi’s waste management problem is nothing new, with around 16,000 tonnes of garbage generated in the city last year by a population of over 13 million residents. Most of it makes it to two huge landfills in the city but around 30 Percent remains on the streets. It was only when the ravaging monsoon season that hit the metropolis last month that the garbage problem became hard to ignore, as it literally came to the surface, floating atop flooded streets. The response by the federal and provincial governments has been underwhelming, to say the least. The Sindh Governor took the lead in the matter, claiming he could clean up Karachi in two weeks as he called upon residents of the city to help where they could and asked for assistance from the FWO and Pakistan Army. After realizing that removal of over 10 years of garbage from the city was not a two-week job, he quickly changed his position to ask for more time and assistance. Meanwhile the provincial government– split between the mayor of Karachi from MQM and PPP running the province– has not had much success either. While Sindh CM Murad Ali Shah has limited his response to the problem by making statements assuring the city that he is ‘looking into the problem’, Karachi Mayor Waseem Akhtar has been relatively more proactive. But he too has made something of joke of the matter by appointing the controversial former mayor of Karachi Mustafa Kamal to head the ‘garbage disposal project’ only to remove him within hours from the post for ‘political point scoring’.
To make matters worse, all three parties, the PTI, PPP and MQM-P have been at each other’s throats over the disastrous effects of this monsoon season that usually spares Karachi. This has been a long time coming as consecutive governments over the past years have not considered this as an issue that required their attention. Rather than bickering over it now, all stakeholders will have to work together to get the required funds and manpower to remove the garbage first and then create a proper waste management infrastructure for proper and efficient disposal so that it does not pile up again over time.