‘No need for dinosaurs’

Residents agree that local govt system has been driving a phenomenal amount of development in a short period of time.

HYDERABAD/ KARACHI: Seeing is believing, especially when it comes to the progress of our cities in Sindh. We like to see flyovers, parks and new roads. And in Hyderabad’s case, most residents agree that the local government system has been the engine driving a phenomenal amount of its development in a short period of time.

“Just a decade ago, there wasn’t a single flyover or well-kept park here until the city district government system was introduced under Musharraf’s rule,” commented resident Anwaar.

What rankles, however, is that acknowledging the magic of the local government system means thanking the dictator’s wand. Mirza Ashiq Hussain was an administrator for Hyderabad in the 1990s and is a current leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party. He disputes the argument that all city works, such as sewage, hospitals and roads were a gift from the dictator’s years. “You should look at it from this perspective — previous city administrators didn’t have the funds to execute mega projects.”

Indeed, the numbers were very different. When Mirza Ashiq Hussain ran Hyderabad ten years ago, he had a budget of only Rs50 million. By 2009, the numbers had increased nearly 100-fold so that the city’s local government had a Rs5 billion surplus budget.

Proponents of the local government system used words like “devolve” and “grass roots” but one of the major complaints against the mechanism was the inequality of distribution. In addition to Mirza Ashiq Hussain, Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz’s Bashir Qureshi questions the performance of Kanwar Naveed Jamil, the last nazim, who belongs to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. JSQM’s Qureshi claims that everyone can see that some areas in Hyderabad were deliberately left undeveloped because they were not part of a certain vote bank.

“There was a similar situation in Karachi where [Pakhtun] Banaras and other such areas, which are not dominated by Urdu-speaking voters, have been abandoned,” alleged Qureshi. Indeed, the Jamaat-e-Islami union council nazims in Karachi walked out in protest several times from city council sessions when Mustafa Kamal was city nazim. They alleged that they were not given funding to undertake works in their neighbourhoods because they were not part of the MQM’s vote bank.

The argument cuts both ways, though. What, for example, did Makhdoom Rafiquz Zaman, the Pakistan Peoples Party candidate and brother of Makhdoom Amin Fahim, do during his tenure as the Hyderabad nazim in the years before the MQM took its turn at the reins of the city? Zaman was unavailable for comment but former administrator Hussain defended his party co-member by saying that, “Makhdoom saheb didn’t get as many funds as the MQM’s candidate and was unable to carry out mega projects.”

For his part, the MQM’s Kanwar Naveed describes these allegations against him as a “political game” by his opponents. “I constructed parks, flyovers, water filtration plants and hospitals all over the city,” he said, adding that the fact of the matter was that Zaman had nothing to show for his tenure.

“I constructed a flyover and converted a clinic into a full-fledged hospital in Qasimabad so even I don’t know what they’re talking about when they say I developed select areas,” Kanwar Naveed retorts. The Hosh Mohammad Sheedi flyover is at Latif Chowk, Qasimabad, and the hospital is in Sehrish Nagar.

When asked why the streets in Qasimabad were worse off than those in MQM-dominated areas such as Latifabad, Kanwar Naveed said: “What you’re talking about is how the budget was used at the individual UC level. Each UC had funds to develop roads in their areas, if some didn’t do their job then it was the inefficiency of that particular UC.”

Hyderabad, a city of two million, is divided into four talukas and 52 union councils.

As former nazims of Hyderabad fight over claims of who did what (or not) for the city, Anwaar, a resident and daily wage worker, offers a few pearls of wisdom. “We don’t need dinosaurs,” he says, referring to the giant T-Rex sculptures placed in parks and roundabouts across the city. Hyderabad needs to put its money into efficient transportation, 24-hour electricity and a garbage disposal system. “But instead we choose to waste money on monuments of monsters that never even roamed in Hyderabad in prehistoric times.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 29^th, 2010.