And yet, the citizenry feels deeply underserved.
The reason is neither a mystery nor ideological. It is painfully mundane. Day-to-day governance has collapsed. The back roads off major arteries are in disrepair. Drainage and sewage systems routinely fail. Pavements are broken or nonexistent. Construction is unregulated. Pest control is absent. These are not abstract policy failures; they are daily indignities that grind people down through sheer repetition.
Is this willful neglect, or the hubris of indispensability?
The Pakistan People’s Party recently won a mandate in Karachi, but it governs under constant anxiety — fear of dismissal, governor’s rule or extra-constitutional intervention. In such a climate, its instinct is to cling to visibility. Mega projects become shields. They signal competence while betraying governance on the ground. This does not make the party malicious, but it does make it dangerously disconnected.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s recent admission that the Centre is seeking to take over provincial management, citing incompetence and ineptitude, was met with a familiar response: a catalogue of development works across Sindh. The defence was predictable. The problem is that it misses the point entirely.
People are not asking for more grand announcements. They are asking for relief from the everyday wear and tear of living in a city that does not function. When lives are lost to open manholes, reckless dumpers, collapsing buildings or institutional neglect — and tragedies like Gul Plaza — no list of mega projects can compensate. Governance is ultimately experienced at street level, not press conference level.
To the PPP’s credit, it is not entirely deaf. The party maintains dialogue with business elites and philanthropic circles. It hears complaints through protests, opposition pressure and crises that erupt too visibly to ignore. But listening is not the same as acting, and good intentions do not substitute for capacity.
Even a well-intentioned government must confront a hard truth: it cannot deliver without devolving power.
The provincial government simply does not possess the on-ground machinery required to manage sanitation, primary healthcare, schools, neighbourhood infrastructure and municipal regulation across a megacity like Karachi. That machinery can only exist through empowered local governments. Without them, the province governs at a distance — reactive, overwhelmed and structurally incapable.
Local governments are not a threat to provincial authority; they are the arms and feet of the body politic. For a party that prides itself on progressive legislation and mass politics, this should be self-evident. Devolution empowers the unempowered, builds leadership from below, and creates competition grounded in service delivery rather than symbolism.
Under local government fall precisely those functions that define daily life. When these systems work, politics becomes credible. When they fail, no ideology survives intact.
Yet instead of accelerating this devolution, the Election Commission — an institution long accused of pliancy toward entrenched power — is currently facilitating an amendment to the local government election law through minimal textual changes. Their effect is maximal: delay.
Section 219(1) of the Elections Act, in its original form, reads: “The Commission shall conduct elections to the local governments under the applicable local government law, and the rules framed thereunder, as may be applicable to a province, cantonments, or the Islamabad Capital Territory.”
The proposed amendment by the ECP, however, states: “The Commission shall conduct elections to the local governments under the applicable local government law at the time of the expiry of the term or dissolution of the local governments, and the rules framed thereunder, as may be applicable to a province, cantonments, or the Islamabad Capital Territory.”
By merely adding the words “time of expiry”, and by using the resources and time of the state to convene the National Assembly to amend the law, the ECP is intends to achieve two things absolving its neglect of a previous Supreme Court ruling and delaying elections at the behest of its masters. This postpones the only medicine capable of addressing Pakistan’s development decay.
The PPP cannot dispel accusations of incompetence or hubris through mega projects alone. It can do so only by embracing what it has long claimed to believe in: decentralisation, empowerment and institutional depth. Fast-tracking local government elections would not weaken the party. It would strengthen it. It would undercut critics, restore credibility, and build the capacity the province so visibly lacks.
More importantly, it would begin to ease the everyday burdens that citizens carry in silence, burdens no flyover can lift.