Will the new local government make Karachi great again? Karachi has been consistently ranked among the most unliveable cities in the world. ...
Will the new local government make Karachi great again?
Karachi has been consistently ranked among the most unliveable cities in the world.
The city of lights seems to have fallen into the darkness of neglect. With every passing year, the entire municipal machinery and infrastructure seems to be inching closer to a total collapse. In fact, most of its municipal services, including its transport network, fresh water supply, and drainage network, already qualify as nonfunctional.
In fact, so dire is the situation that now the authorities don’t even attempt to gloss over their shortcomings. The newest fad is to lay the blame squarely on the people for the city’s state and even accuse them of exaggerating the issues.
Amid all this, the upcoming local government elections — now scheduled for October 23 after being postponed twice — have gained unprecedented anticipation.
elections as the harbinger of hope for a possible turnaround of the city. However, hope without taking into account the ground realities often leads to disappointment. What must be understood here is to what extent can the upcoming elections alter the city’s fate.
Question of the hour
The answer to this lies in two inherent questions. One, what could be the potential outcome of the upcoming elections and to what extent can the results be predicted at this stage? Two, what mandate and leverage would the new government have to implement the requisite reforms?
To answer each of these questions, we first need to understand how things worked around the time of the last local government elections in Karachi that were held in 2015.
Yet again, three important things need to be evaluated on this account. One, what was the outlook of the city’s administrative/electoral boundaries back then? Two, what was the political orientation of these administrative boundaries? And three, how does that administrative structure look today?
Let’s start with an overview of the local government system in Pakistan. Since the promulgation of the the 18th constitutional amendment, the formation of local governments has been made a provincial subject. In Sindh, which has been ruled by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) since 2008, this subject falls under the Local Government ministry.
Devolution to the grassroots
In 2015, the city was divided into 246 Union Committees and Councils, collectively abbreviated as UCs. A UC is the smallest administrative and constituent unit in an urban and rural setting, respectively.
These UCs merge to form district governments, of which there were five in 2015. These district governments are called the District Municipal Corporations (DMCs), each of which is headed by a chairperson. On top of these district governments is the city or metropolitan government, called the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC), headed by the mayor.
each respective UC, including the chairperson and the deputy chairperson. From here on, the chairperson of each UC votes for the election of the mayor and chairperson of the respective DMC, whereas the deputy chairperson of the UC votes for the election of the deputy mayor and the deputy chairperson of the DMC. Hence, the UCs form the basic and most critical block of the structure that forms the local government.
The power struggle
The local political scene of Karachi has witnessed its fair share of turmoil, in addition to severe bouts of violence on ethnic grounds over the last few decades. For at least two of those decades, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement — Karachi’s indigenous political party, now split into various factions — dominated its political canvas.
The MQM was considered the representative of the majority ethnic group of the city, the Muhajirs. The PPP, meanwhile, always rivalled the MQM in Karachi and enjoyed significant support among the non-Muhajir communities.
These ethnic fault lines were evident in the 2015 local government elections following which three of the five district governments — East, West and Central — were formed by the MQM-Pakistan. All three of the districts are densely populated and are predominantly home to the Muhajir community.
Meanwhile, the remaining two district governments — Malir and South — were formed by PPP. These two districts have a mixed composition in terms of their ethnicity, income per capita, and population density. District South, in particular, is a mix of upscale towns such as DHA and Clifton, which have low population densities, compared to other towns in the district such as Lyari and Keamari.
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