A powerless mayor can’t deliver the goods, says governor

Sindh Governor Imran Ismail has said that the Karachi mayor should be entrusted with the job of lifting municipal waste from the city as the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB) has failed to do the needful in this regard.

He stated this on Saturday while speaking at a briefing organised at the Governor House on Saturday in connection with the Ehsaas Programme of the federal government aimed at poverty alleviation.

Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection Dr Sania Nishtar, Sindh Local Government Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, Sindh Law and Environment Adviser Barrister Murtaza Wahab, MNAs and MPAs attended the briefing.

The governor said the mayor of the city would not be in a position to deliver if he was without powers. He emphasised that the mayor’s was an honourable and respectable position, and the president of Pakistan also believed that the mayor was without authority.

He said that Karachi had been divided among several authorities as no single authority existed in the city. “It is time to decide as under which authority Karachi will be run,” he said.

The governor said doing sanitation work in Karachi was like a never-ending job as the city remained unclean no matter how much one did the cleanliness work. He said that drains of the city got filthy the very next moment its de-silting was done.

He said civic issues did exist in the city, including those related to sanitation work, because the city was being managed by different authorities. The governor said that all over the world, mayors of cities were responsible for the cleanliness and sanitation jobs.

He added that the Sindh, federal and local governments were required to sit together to find a way out of this problem.

Ismail said the lifting of municipal waste from the city was not a big issue as the main problem was adoption of a composite system for properly disposing of this garbage as trash piled up in the city on a daily basis. He said the local government’s agencies had to be given authority in this regard for better results.

He said Prime Minister Imran Khan in September 2019 would inaugurate five federally-funded development projects in Karachi on their completion.

The governor said that the Ehsaas Programme had been launched by the federal government as its first step towards its ultimate goal of establishing a Madina-like state in Pakistan as this initiative would prove highly beneficial to the countrymen. “It is the desire of the prime minister of Pakistan that the masses should be served in the best of the manner,” he said.

He said that in this regard the issuance of health insurance cards had been an important decision in the history of the country as every beneficiary family of the programme could avail medical insurance coverage of up to Rs750,000 on a yearly basis while this ceiling of the insurance expenditure could be increased in cases of life-threatening diseases.

He said that a transparent methodology was being adopted to collect the data of deserving people in the country under the foolproof system so as to register them for the Ehassas Programme.

He said the PM rightly deserved appreciation for launching the Ehsaas Programme and the services of all the people associated with this initiative should also be eulogised. The governor expressed his desire that the Sindh government should collaborate with the federal authorities for working together on programmes like the Ehsaas initiative, although at present the Sindh government had not been involved in the federal government in the health insurance cards’ scheme.

Earlier speaking on the occasion, Dr Sania Nishtar said the fulfillment of the services related to human rights was the foremost priority of the government. She said that the private sector would also be contacted for the success of the Ehsaas Programme.

Mayor Wasim Akhtar has come under fire over his failure to remove garbage from the city, where sanitary conditions have worsened due stagnant sewage and rainwater after the recent monsoon rains. He says he needs funds and more machinery to achieve the task. The Sindh government on the other hand insists that the mayor has enough money and staffers to make the city clean, but he is doing the politics or garbage. The chief minister of Sindh, Syed Murad Ali Shah, remarked the other day that the politics about garbage had turned dirtier than garbage itself.