KARACHI: Mayor Murtaza Wahab has waded into the ongoing debate over Federal Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s proposal for new administrative units, arguing that if any province is to be carved up for the sake of governance reform, the process should begin with Punjab rather than Sindh.
Speaking to a private TV channel, the PPP leader — whose own election as Karachi mayor last year was contested by opposition parties, who had accused the PPP-led Sindh local government of manipulating the process in his favour — said that PML-N in Punjab, PTI in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the PPP would all offer kind words about Sindh, but that Sindh remains the only province in the country with an actual functioning local government system in place, a distinction he said does not exist in either Punjab or Islamabad.
Wahab pointed out that Punjab is, in fact, the only province where its own assembly had formally moved on the question of new provinces, recalling that in 2012 the Punjab Assembly had passed a resolution calling for the creation of South Punjab and Bahawalpur as separate provinces. He noted that Shehbaz Sharif was serving as Punjab’s Chief Minister at the time, and argued that if the current push for new administrative units is genuine, the initiative ought to originate from Punjab itself.
Political observers believe the remarks by Mayor Karachi add Sindh’s ruling party to a widening field of political voices reacting to Naqvi’s July 30 proposal in Karachi for new administrative units, which has since drawn a range of responses, including from the ANP’s Aimal Wali Khan, who questioned who was really driving the proposal, and from the military’s media wing, whose chief told reporters this week that any such decision would need to reflect public aspirations and be made within the bounds of the Constitution.
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