Govern, Burn, Run!

The Gul Plaza tragedy was not merely an accident; it was a public exposure of how Karachi is governed, regulated, and neglected. Reports of locked exits, delayed emergency response, and ignored safety warnings have forced Karachi to confront a bitter reality: the city is not collapsing because its people lack resilience; it is collapsing because its institutions lack accountability.

Each time such a disaster occurs, the national conversation returns to the same emotional question: Who owns Karachi, and who should control it? After Gul Plaza, calls to declare Karachi a federal territory have resurfaced. For many citizens exhausted by decades of dysfunction, taking Karachi out of Sindh’s administrative control sounds decisive. Yet, while emotionally appealing, this proposal is neither wise nor structurally sound, because it misunderstands Karachi’s crisis. The problem is not which tier is formally in charge, but that the tier that should govern the city’s daily functioning has never been allowed to exist meaningfully.

Turning Karachi into a federal territory would be a shortcut that avoids the real diagnosis. Karachi’s crisis is not a mere jurisdictional dispute between Islamabad and Sindh; it is the chronic failure to build a functioning third tier of government capable of regulating buildings, enforcing safety codes, maintaining infrastructure, and responding effectively. A federal territory arrangement would likely reproduce the same dysfunction with a new letterhead. It would add another layer of control rather than fixing the broken chain of authority and responsibility. It would also weaken democratic accountability at the point where services are delivered, because city services improve through daily enforcement, local inspection, and routine monitoring, not distant control. Most importantly, it would create a political escape hatch, allowing provincial elites to shift blame upward while keeping the deeper problem intact, the absence of a robust and empowered local government system.

Pakistan’s constitutional framework already points towards the correct solution. Article 140A requires provinces to establish local government systems and devolve political, administrative, and financial authority to elected local representatives. This is not symbolic language; it is a constitutional commitment to democratic devolution. Yet, decades after this promise, local governments in Pakistan remain weak, are routinely amended, and are structurally dependent on provincial discretion.

In Sindh, the story has been particularly painful. Karachi has been allowed to hold elections, but denied real control over its municipal functions. It has allowed mayors, but not the tools required to govern. The result is that Karachi’s city government is blamed for failures, while authority remains fragmented across provincial departments, development authorities, and semi-autonomous bodies that are not answerable to Karachi’s voters.

This is why local government reform is not a technical debate; it is the central political struggle for Karachi’s future. Karachi’s failures are predictable outcomes of a political economy that treats the city as a trophy and a tax base, rather than a democratic unit with rights. This is what citizens mean when they say Karachi is ruled like a colony.

Even when reforms are announced, they often remain cosmetic. Sindh’s amendments to its local government law periodically promise greater powers for mayors, stronger municipal revenue authority, and better coordination with development agencies. On paper, these changes appear progressive, yet Karachi’s lived reality is different. Authority remains scattered, fiscal autonomy is limited, and institutional fragmentation continues. A mayor may gain symbolic influence, but if water, sanitation, planning, building control, and emergency response remain divided across competing bodies, accountability becomes a performance rather than a reality. When disasters like Gul Plaza occur, no single institution is held responsible because responsibility is shared, diluted, and therefore evaded.