Karachi: need to utilise Gen Z's potential

Karachi is a city of twenty million people and zero accountability. Twenty broken-but-not-gone million. More than the entire population of the Netherlands, crammed into a place where the roads flood every monsoon as per schedule, where garbage sits on street corners for days, and where the water that reaches your tap is something you would not give to an animal. And who has been running this city for the last three decades of nothing? The same families, the same parties, the same tried and tested faces rotating between the same mocking, lying and cheating institutions. They have rotated through the same chairs for thirty years. It's time you showed us your work and then explained why Karachi should grant you one more sunrise.

Gen Z entered a city already drowning. They did not read about the water crisis in a report; they lived it. They did not study infrastructure collapse in a classroom; they drove through it every single day, dodging potholes that had been there since their parents were their age. But the absent shame is not the flood. The next disaster is being told to be patient while you drown. Patient with what? With whose process? Who designed this particular way of dying, and what has it actually produced besides the same dysfunction with a different name on the letterhead?

What separates this generation from every frustrated generation before it is that they have the receipts. When Karachi flooded in 2020, it was not the government documenting it; it was kids standing knee-deep in water, filming in real time, uploading before officials had even finished their press conferences. When COVID hit, and Orangi Town needed food, it was not a ministry that organised the response; it was twenty-year-olds with WhatsApp groups and borrowed trucks. The civic muscle is already there. What has never existed is anyone in power taking it seriously enough to fund it and actually get out of its way.

Take garbage, because the garbage situation in this city is a screaming confession of who has been governing it. You cannot walk through Liaquatabad or Nazimabad without understanding that the state has abandoned these neighborhoods completely. The bins are not there. Collection is unreliable. And yet every few years, some official announces that Karachi needs stricter fines for littering, as if the problem is the residents rather than the complete absence of any system that would allow them to behave differently. You want to fine someone for throwing trash on the street? Where is the alternative you created?

Any serious fix starts with bins every two hundred meters in every dense neighborhood, fines through digital payment platforms with no cash accepted, and a corps of Sanitation Aides recruited from unemployed young people in the city itself. Reward citizens who report dumping. Give clean neighborhoods discounts on collection fees. Make the consequences of bad governance visible and personal.

Is Gen Z too young? The people who ran Karachi into the ground were also young once, and nobody asked them to prove themselves before handing them authority. Is it about experience? What experience? The experience of draining infrastructure budgets without building roads, the experience of collecting taxes from a city and investing them somewhere else entirely, the experience of showing up before elections and vanishing after? Because if that is the bar, then yes, Gen Z does not have that experience, and that is precisely the point.

Karachi belongs to the people living in it. Yet again, the looters own it. When does it end? Right now. And who made that choice? Not twenty million people.