Mayor to be accountable for Rs39bn given to KMC: Wahab

Sindh Information and Law Adviser Barrister Murtaza Wahab has said Karachi Mayor Wasim Akhtar, instead of complaining about lack of authority and finances available to him, should make himself accountable for the Rs39 billion given by Sindh government to the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) during the last three years.

Speaking to media persons at the Sindh Assembly on Tuesday, he said the provincial government during the last three years had given Rs 39 billion to the KMC, but nobody knew exactly what happened to the fiscal support extended to the municipal authority.

Apart from this sum, the government had also extended financial support to the KMC under the head of the Octroi Zila Tax, he added. “Our friends belonging to the MQM-Pakistan complain to us about not giving money [to the KMC]. Has the MQM ever talked about these Rs39 billion and where exactly this money has been spent?”

“The mayor of the KMC always complains about lack of authority, but we have instead spent Rs8.5 billion on Karachi on our own. The KMC should better tell how many roads it has constructed and how many arteries it has repaired through these Rs39 billion.”

Barrister Wahab said the government by utilising Rs8.5 billion had constructed or repaired Sharea Faisal, University Road, Hub River Road, 12,000 Road, roads around Cantonment Railway Station, flyovers on Shaheed-e-Millat Road and Tipu Sultan Road. “We have carried out all these works in Karachi as the KMC has no role in doing them,” he said.

He said Abbasi Shaheed Hospital and the Karachi Institute of Heart Diseases being run by the KMC had not been providing health care services to the people of the city. He said the government had extended financial support to the KMC during all these years through its own resources despite the fact that the KMC had its own revenue generating resources.

“The KMC has never met its own revenue generation targets as it should be separately held accountable for this. They didn’t even have the resources to rebuild the Jahangir Park of Karachi,” he said. “You didn’t get the mandate to do politicking as you got the mandate to serve the people,” said the adviser.

He said the KMC instead of serving the people had brazenly used its bulldozers to bulldoze shops in the city to deprive livelihoods from traders in the city. To a question, Wahab said Karachi was a major hub of revenue generation in the country, but the taxes collected from the city were sent to the federation as later on these revenue resources were divided among the provinces. He said the MQM had always done politics on the basis of hatred but they had failed on this account.

Mayor’s reply

Responding to the remarks made Barrister Murtaza Wahab, Mayor Wasim Akhtar asked at a press conference what the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government did while being in power for 10 years in Sindh.

He said he had been asked to give details of Rs39 billion which the PPP led government claimed to have given to the KMC. “The entire country and the Supreme Court is demanding of the PPP to give the details of spending of Rs90billion alone on Larkana and Rs2,000 billion in entire Sindh,” he said.

The Sindh government in three years gave Rs17billion on account of salaries for the KMC employees and Rs7.81 billion for pensions of retired employees, which add up to around Rs26 billion, he added.

The mayor said the government also released a sum of Rs10.34 billion on account of the Annual Development Fund for the same period from 2016 to 2019 and this amount was paid to the contractors directly by the government. Out of this amount, he said, Rs8.66 billion were for ongoing schemes and the remaining 1.677 billion were for new schemes.

This is the total amount released in three years to Karachi, which is about Rs38 billion, he said. Akhtar said that the share of Octroi Zila Tex of the KMC is Rs1.17 billion, but it only gets Rs590 million and the Sindh government curtailed about 580 million each month from it in the name of mega projects. “They are not setting up the formula under PFC deliberately so that KMC doesn’t get its due share,” he said.

He said the citizens of Karachi were sensible enough to understand all this and they could not be made fool by showing fabricated figures and making such baseless allegations. The government, he believed was using KMC functions and making mega projects in Karachi to gain the political benefits out of it. “These projects have no quality and their poor standards could be seen on ground,” he said.

The mayor said the KMC from its own resources collected Rs1.2billion revenue which it spent on providing municipal services like fire brigade, health care facilities in hospitals, maintenance of parks and grounds, zoos and Safari Park, and maintenance of 22 major roads.

According to the mayor, their revenue resources were further devolved to other civic bodies which made the KMC cash-starved. He said the government could not give funds for the development of Karachi; however, the MQM brought Rs9billion development projects to the city, including two big fire brigades and two major roads construction projects, which were nearing completion and this was a big achievement for them.

He said he was not sure that the Rs162billion package announced by the federal government for Karachi would be implemented in a transparent manner in the city under the incumbent Sindh government, which had devastated the city and the whole province with its large-scale corruption. Deputy Mayor Syed Arshad Hassan was also present at the press conference held in the KMC head office.