PM’s Karachi visit

Letter July 04, 2015
Neither any decisive steps were announced or taken to tackle problems associated with power outages

KARACHI: The outcome of of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit to Karachi is disappointing. There is an obvious crisis of governance in Sindh with the provincial government unable to rule and fulfil its responsibility. It has reached a point where people are dying in the street in droves. Besides, the security situation is far from under control and needs to be addressed on the basis of the findings given before the Apex Committee by the DG Rangers. Governance, as well as security issues, cannot be tackled successfully if the sources of financing terrorism are not investigated thoroughly. The visit of the prime minister has not made a contribution towards this aim. On the contrary, only measures in the same line as before have been announced and it is anybody’s guess what the fate of those announcements will be. Neither any decisive steps were announced or taken to tackle the problems associated with power outages, nor has the corruption problem been mentioned. Furthermore, instead of the announced plans by the prime minister to visit heatwave victims in hospitals, he cut his trip short and disappeared after only a few hours to head home, as we are told, to prepare for a private trip to Norway with his family.

This shows the priority of our rulers that, finally, after 12 days of the carnage unleashed in Karachi by the heat and the deaths of well over 1,200 people, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made the shortest of trips to Karachi. He arrived after ostensibly having been briefed by the army chief in detail about what to say and what not to say. That is possibly good news because by all accounts it seems that it is the military and not the civilian government that is standing behind the Karachi operation; it is the Rangers which started opening heatstroke centres in town when all the politicians were sitting at home. It was the DG Rangers, General Bilal Akbar, who spoke out against corruption within political parties and the bureaucracy that upset PPP co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari so much that he gave an enraged speech against the military.

As a matter of fact, neither the Sindh government and administration nor Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif seem to have any pity for the poor people of Pakistan. Otherwise, the prime minster would have at least visited a hospital or announced some help and compensation for the families of the victims. Instead, both sides continue to indulge in a blame game against K-Electric and the water board. Whatever K-Electric does or doesn’t do is the responsibility of the federal government as well.

Pakistan is surely in a bad situation; while the PPP blames the PML-N, the PML-N blames the PPP and in the end, it just seems as if they are nothing more than partners in crime.

Ali Ashraf Khan

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4th,  2015.

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