New mayor out to fire HMC contractual employees: MQM-P

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) has warned Pakistan Peoples Party led Sindh government and the party's newly elected mayor of Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (HMC) that they will resist attempts to turn Hyderabad into Dadu or Larkana.

Speaking at a press conference at Hyderabad Press Club on Friday, MPAs Rashid Khilji and Nadeem Siddiqui alleged that Mayor Kashif Ali Shoro has come with a fake mandate obtained through the local government elections which were a travesty of the electoral process.

Khilji said the purpose of the conference is to expose the budding corruption, plunder and bad governance in the HMC which had kept serving the city despite numerous irritants and financial hardships. He bemoaned that the PPP's mayor has blocked the payment of salaries to the contractual staff, alleging that Shoro wanted to sack those employees and replace them with their own men.

"In the past the MQM-P's mayors wrote several letters to the provincial government to regularise those employees but to no avail." The former administrator Farooq Khan, who was reportedly posted in the HMC on MQM-P's recommendation, had extended services of the contractual staff but the incumbent mayor is planning to fire them, the MPA claimed.

The number of such employees is said to be around 350. Khilji went on to blame Shoro for even stopping the meeting of departmental promotion committee (DPC) which was scheduled thanks to his party's efforts to promote the employees who have been long awaiting upgrade.

He reiterated that the Sindh government wanted to issue fake appointment orders for the HMC, recalling that similar appointments were also detected in the recent years.

He demanded that an inquiry commission headed by reputable persons should be formed to investigate all the fake appointments made in the HMC. He blamed the Sindh government for posting officers in the HMC who do not belong to Hyderabad.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 22^nd, 2023.