How fast the time passes but I can’t help wondering we can’t see it as we see a dog running. It is now well over a month that they crowned me with the command of Sindh, as I like the one before me don’t mind the phone calls as well. I still find it hard to believe that the lady luck, out of the blue Gulf sky, smiled on me, but well, honeymooning has now faded away, and I am left with the rich legacy of the dirty facts that stares me in the face. Nonetheless, I’m thankful to my nonagenarian predecessor, as people see in me a young leader bursting with fresh vigour, but then this is what that haunts me all the more.
Taking stock, I find to my dismay the whole of my domain appears to have gone off the rails into a trash can; you name an evil that a decade of bungled governance could bear, and that’s there in full play. An army of ghosts on the payrolls and, worst of all, are the ubiquitous mounds of garbage lining the streets and spilling over gutters choking every town and city. The other day a brash foreign journalist reported on the province: “…a causal, lackadaisical nonchalance pervades the top leadership of the ministries, percolating right up to the chief minister himself.”
Of the whole province, the interior, habitually content with its medieval fate, sees little problem with our party and its slothful ways, but it is the city of Karachi where the shoe pinches me. The outcry for disposal of the city waste and revival of the moribund municipal bodies hurts me like a thorn in flesh. Just yesterday a noise awoke me from my post-breakfast siesta, and I saw that the police at the gate were thrashing some desperados ahead of a rally who tried to dump a garbage-laden trolley right in front of my house. How naïvely they hoped that such dirty tactics would force me at once to embark upon a cleanliness drive, not a sensible way of protest to a novice like me.
All the same, I stepped in and at once calmed them down by saying that wide-spreading garbage in the city is a menace to every one; I am here with a mission, and I’m absolutely determined to fight it. Chief-ministership is not a new thing to me. I have already lived here when my father was the chief minister (CM). And I have not become your CM for the sake of staying in this big house. We must confront what is a nuisance to us all. Give me a month, and you will see with your own eyes that all the garbage and all the sewage has vanished. I have a dream; I have a dream of seeing our children walking down the squeaky-clean streets and enjoying the beach. Make no mistake, it is all a matter of a month, and Karachi will be the envy of Singapore and Dubai and Hong Kong, all put together.
But at heart I still question: why don’t they try to understand that today’s politics is transactional, and when you don’t give us votes, how on earth do we have the mandate to collect your rubbish and that you pin hopes in me? Still I fear that this neat logic of hands-off policy followed by my much-reviled predecessor will not work. Elections loom in the horizon, and Bilawal made it clear to me how he persuaded Baba into relieving and dispatching the old Sphinx to his hometown and lending the cockpit to me. Now is the time to return the favour by winning over the city where the party, over the last decade, has had the most tenuous toehold.
It has brought me no solace either that the people of Karachi have now got their new mayor, as they now protest that the local government act has clipped the mayor’s wings, and he is powerless even to fire a work-shy sweeper, nothing to speak of discharging the municipal responsibilities. It gives me jitters that I am now to shoulder the Herculean task of scrubbing up the city roads within the short span of a year or two. And when I see the tools at my disposal, what I can say is that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are not worth the tuppence. And any move to bring some semblance of order will amount to stirring up the hornet’s nest, which our party could ill afford at this juncture when Bilawal’s career is at stake. In such a stinking scenario, I am convinced that it calls for an out-of-box solution.
It appears just as feasible that people are persuaded to regard maintaining garbage piles as good long-term investments for the recycling industry. Besides the convenience, there is a heap of trash everywhere for you to empty your garbage can on, or toss your trash out of car window anywhere in the city at will with no feeling of guilt. Teach the people to wade through the garbage without resenting it. After all, we don’t mind all the garbage pouring out of nightly talk shows and commercials. Rather, educate them to see the beauty in a piece of garbage floating in an over-flowing sewage.
Earlier, I also used to think that garbage pollutes the environment, but now thinking out of the box it occurs to me it may rather be the other way round. There is a global concern over the ever-widening Ozone hole, and we may offer the UN environment people to plug that nasty hole by rocketing our millions of tons of rubbish into it. This planet, after all, is everybody’s home, and we as a whole may contribute our bit. See the goodwill it generates for our country when the young beauties in the West will be basking in the sun on the beach with no fear of solar radiation damaging their bare skin, tempting them to tan their bodies in all.
The potholed roads may also be considered necessary as there is no better check on reckless driving, thus saving lives and limbs. In this weird world, it also might be possible that one happens to have one’s fetishes and foibles like a proclivity to see swarms of flies and mosquitoes humming around. Man, as they say, is a social animal.
The other day while visiting Mohenjo Daro with some foreign dignitaries who were visibly impressed by its ancient sanitary system, one guest asked me what a future archeologist would think of the city of Karachi some thousands of years from now. As I fumbled for a response to this ‘taunt’, another one put me at ease by blurting out that the archeologist might think that the people of Karachi were so resourceful that they once decided to dump the whole city into a mound of trash.
(Writer’s note: This is a page from the imaginary diary of the new chief minister of Sindh)