Saeed Ghani’s governance record left Karachi paying the price.

Saeed Ghani is Sindh’s Minister of Local Government, responsible for whether Karachi’s buildings stand, its water reaches its homes, and its hospitals are safe. According to his government’s record, he has failed in all three, and instead of owning up, he reaches for conspiracy theories.

In July 2025, twenty-seven people were killed when the Futon Mansion collapsed in Lyari, a building that had been declared dangerous by its own Sindh Building Control Authority several years earlier. Notices issued; No one enforced them. This is not propaganda. This is the SBCA’s own paperwork, while 588 buildings across the city, 107 in Lyari alone are awaiting their turn.

So when Sindh Minister suggests to create grievances by outside forces, I directly ask when ISPR demanded to make Sindh a new province? The demand comes from residents who buy water from tankers as the province acknowledges a supply gap of about 50 percent, and from families whose children tested HIV positive at the Kulsoombai Walika hospital because sterilization and infection control were not there. It was never a conspiracy. It has been owned by the poorly governed PPP since 2008. And whenever there is real accountability, the PPP pushes the JSQM and other Sindhi nationalist groups to protest so that its own name never hits the headlines. This is not accountability. This anger is outsourcing so the party running the ministries never has to sit in the dock.

This is a pattern, not an accident. In 2006, the City District Council canceled the leases of twelve “ghost” petrol stations amid allegations of nepotism and lost public revenue. In 2017, the Sindh High Court barred him from exercising ministerial powers, saying he had no legal right as a mere adviser. He resigned instead of answering the case. In 2019, with nearly 60 percent of Karachi’s garbage uncollected, its government paid citizens 100,000 rupees to film it, as if a phone camera could substitute for a functioning sanitation department. In 2021, his department was accused of paying nearly three times the market rate for school desks, allegedly wasting Sh3 billion, and he referred a committee. In 2023, his own party’s local elections were marred by allegations of rigging by three opposition parties.

In 2026, he admitted on camera that his own organization swallowed more than 20 billion rupees in corruption, said that officials involved had been transferred, and claimed that he was under pressure to push for accountability. Forgive me if I have not admired a man for discovering in his years of ministry that the department he was running had been hollowed out from within.

Then there’s what everyone already knows: 78 children tested positive for HIV at a hospital under his department, six deaths recorded in inquiry coverage, 37 officials eventually suspended after the fallout. Ghani himself constituted the first inquiry as the then in-charge Labor Minister. After Lyari, eight SBCA officials were arrested, he led his own party colleague Nabil Gabol to call the SBCA the most corrupt department in the city and asked if the minister should resign. He didn’t. He held a press conference, blamed negligence elsewhere in the system, and retained his ministry.

This is the same minister who told Karachi in 2022 that residents multiply their problems a hundredfold, with the same water, drainage and waste failures now on their desks. His department has been allocated Rs 74 billion, another Rs 60 billion for foreign-aided schemes, yet K-IV, a project his government touts as proof of progress, is about 50 percent complete by March 2025. The city’s distribution network has not even been tendered. This is not a plan. This is a press release with a deadline to respond to no one in his department. Real relief may not reach residents until 2028 or 2029.

I am not judging everything about NAB. But the test that matters is not the courtroom decision. It is whether the minister protects citizens before disasters, not after the body count. Ghani has repeatedly failed this test on the record of his own government.

Blaming the ISPR does not answer for Lyari, for Valika Hospital, for the disappearance of Rs 20 billion or for the water project years later. Karachi is not confused about who rules it. This is done by simply saying that his suffering is someone else’s script, and that excuse has expired.

The post Saeed Ghani’s governance record left Karachi paying the price appeared first on Daily Pakistan English News.

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