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| The ostrich solution |
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Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Cowardice is an indictable offence in the military – and can if proven can have terminal consequences. Perhaps sadly, a charge of cowardice cannot be levelled at those bodies and institutions that fail to live up to their public duty, or to satisfactorily give an account of themselves and their shortcomings in the court of public opinion. Were it possible to bring such a charge the Karachi Electrical Subtraction Company (KESC) would stand before us in the dock today – if, that is, anyone representative of it could be found who could actually be placed in the dock to hear the charges. At the time of writing on Monday afternoon there has been no statement from this cowardly and ostrich-like organisation which once again has failed millions of customers, brought the largest city in the land to its knees yet again and would apparently be unable to successfully give away free tickets to a test match played in the city it is supposed to supply power to.
To be fair to all concerned, rainfall was at record levels with 225 millimetres falling by Saturday night; 20mm more than the previous record of 205 mm set in 1977. Numbers aside, the fact is that the infrastructure to cope with rainfall, be it power or drainage and water supply, is no better than it was 32 years ago and in many ways is significantly worse. There was no drinkable water in most of the city, families were marooned in their cars and workers in their offices and by midnight on Saturday the population was beginning to riot in a number of places. Whilst we would never condone violence of any sort whatever the provocation, we can at least understand why some felt moved to vent their anger. In less than twelve hours the city had become a disaster area, after forty-eight it remains so.
Whilst nobody has yet admitted this publicly the chain of events leading to this appalling state of affairs suggests that the city does not have a disaster management plan – and if it does, then it doesn’t work. In a time of fast-changing and unpredictable weather patterns the world over cities everywhere have revised and updated their disaster planning. Karachi, as one of the world’s largest cities, should have been at the forefront given that the annual monsoon is a predictable event – though its severity isn’t. Now the blame-game starts as this herd of ostriches led by KESC all frantically deny that this was in any way their fault, that it was everybody else who failed to do their duty and would you mind if we just put our heads into the (wet) sand once again?
This gutless bunch of cowardly lions has once again brought shame, misery, death and destruction on a once proud city. Now, the City of Blights suffers under a blanket of incompetence and mismanagement that renders almost insignificant the actions of political and religious terrorists. Today’s ‘terrorists’ are the bureaucrats and politicians and deal-makers who have parlayed themselves into personal wealth at the expense of those they were employed to serve. Will any heads roll for this gross abuse of power and trust? No. Will all concerned promise to do better next year? Yes. Will they? No. Should they be in the dock? You bet they should, every single last one of the shystering, conniving, wriggling, duplicitous, deceitful, self-righteous, self-serving, incompetent, cronying, crawling and maggot-infested one of them. Give ‘em six months to fix the basics, a year to publicly present a feasible disaster management plan, and an immediate pay cut of 50 per cent for all of them until the goods are delivered. And just for good measure they can do all this work that should have been done before, up to their knees in filthy water and by candlelight. Court adjourned sine-die.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
