August 30, 2020

Cloudburst exposes mudslinging among ruling royalty in Pakistan

topic:	Natural disaster
located:	Pakistan
editor:	Shadi Khan Saif

As the ruling royalty in Pakistan blames the might of nature for the devastation it caused, the flooding in metropolis Karachi exposes the mudslinging among them.

Instead of taking the deadly flash floods in urban areas as a wake-up call, the country’s ruling elite in the army, the political arena and society as a whole seem to continue going about business as usual by simply passing the bucket.

The sooner they realise the grimness of being among the worst climate change victims the better for them. With the little liberty the political parties have in an otherwise thorny arena dominated by the army, the environmental issue must now have a prominent place in their manifestoes.

The irony here is that it seems no lessons have been learned from the severe heatwave of 2015 with temperatures as high as 49 °C (120 °F) which killed approximately 2,000 people. Germanwatch has estimated financial losses worth at least $3.8 billion stemming from some 150 such extreme events in Pakistan between 1999 and 2018.

As an epic example of the richly diverse yet divided ethnic and administrative fabric of the whole country, Karachi has its resilience put to the crippling test yet again.

With a record downpour this month, the city of over 20 million inhabitants first saw its remote slums sink under dirty drainage water that could not reach the Sea due to illegal construction. This calamity failed to shake much of the collective social consciousness until the continuing spells of torrential rains led to flooding in rather well-off neighbourhoods for the same reason of dearth of urban planning and service delivery.

Days after images of poor slum dwellers stranded in knee-deep water made some rounds on social media, the images of new cars, dazzling shopping malls and boulevards sunk in water rang alarm bells.

It led to heated debates on the mainstream media with the flag bearers of the central government, provincial government and city administrations, including the powerful army, trying to simply defend their camps.

This will not work for long. The city is literally going through a calamity and it is going to get catastrophic if the ruling royalty remains unserious towards matters such as smart urban planning envisioning green energy, forestation and responsible management of waste.

Image by Joseph Thomas

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