When fire tore through Gul Plaza on the night of 17 January, the death toll did not stop at the first day’s count. It rose for the better part of a fortnight, as rescue teams pulled bodies from the rubble of one of Karachi’s busiest markets; thirty of them found in a single locked store until the confirmed dead reached nearly eighty. Barely two weeks later, before the last remains had even been returned to their families, fire broke out again at the Al-Najeebi electronics market in Saddar, a few minutes’ drive away. This time it was contained without loss of life; the difference was luck, not a system that had changed. Karachi mourned, ordered an inquiry, and moved on, almost in the same breath.
All of this comes as Pakistan has reopened the debate on creating new provinces. The assumption is familiar: redraw administrative boundaries and governance will improve. Yet Karachi’s recurring tragedies suggest a different question. Before we redraw the map, we should ask whether we have fixed the institutions already responsible for making it work.
The Gul Plaza inquiry found what inquiries into Karachi disasters always find: a building drifted far from its approved plan, safety audits filed and ignored, locked exits, a rescue response slowed by water shortages and missing equipment. None of it was new; all of it had been warned about before and survived every warning, because in Karachi the machinery meant to prevent these deaths answers to no single authority that can be held to account for them.
A few months earlier, when monsoon rains flooded the city, Mayor Murtaza Wahab held a press conference to explain something that should not need explaining: of Karachi’s roughly 600 drains, only 46 fall under his own corporation. The rest belong to Town Municipal Corporations he does not control. He apologised for the traffic chaos that was his to own, and pointed, accurately, at the infrastructure that was not.
I keep returning to this, because I first documented a version of it nearly a decade ago, under an entirely different party. What strikes me now is not that Karachi’s governance is broken — that has never been in dispute — but that it has stayed broken in exactly the same shape through a complete change of political hands.
Two mayors, one condition
In the mid-2000s, Mayor Mustafa Kamal ran Karachi under the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s decades-long dominance, as a deliberate rebrand: signal-free corridors, the Singapore-styled Port Grand waterfront, a pitch to global capital that Karachi had left its violent 1980s and ’90s behind. Investment followed; Bahria Town expanded; international firms moved in. What did not follow was any meaningful voice for the half of Karachi living in informal settlements, whose neighbourhoods were shaped by decisions made without them.
Then, in 2013, a Pakistan Rangers-led operation against organised crime and militant networks broke MQM’s political machine, which had held Karachi for three decades. The security gains were real: Karachi fell from the world’s sixth most dangerous city for crime in 2014 to around 93rd by 2020, on Numbeo’s crowd-sourced index. But the operation also fractured MQM permanently, leaving a decade-long vacuum before the city’s politics settled again.
That resettlement arrived in 2023, when the Pakistan Peoples Party — which had never before controlled Karachi — took the mayoralty for the first time in the city’s history, with MQM boycotting the polls. It should have been a genuine watershed. Instead, as one 2025 account in The Friday Times put it, Mayor Wahab himself has confirmed that Karachi Metropolitan Corporation controls barely a quarter of the city’s geographic area. The rest sits with cantonment boards, port authorities, development authorities, and provincial bodies that answer to no single elected office and to no city-wide master plan. Two parties. Opposite politics. A complete transfer of power. The same structural hollowness underneath.
The divide beneath the divide
Nowhere is that hollowness more visible than in the city’s own geography. Karachi is a megacity of more than 20 million and one of the most unequal on earth. By UN-Habitat’s estimate, over half its residents live in katchi abadis — informal settlements built by people themselves, often on land they hold no title to, wired for water and power through unofficial channels. Orangi Town alone, estimated at more than two million people, ranks among the largest informal settlements in the world. This is the Karachi of Lyari, Orangi, Korangi and Manghopir: dense, self-built, chronically short of water, invisible to any master plan.
A few kilometres away sits the other Karachi — DHA, Clifton, the cantonments — planned, serviced, comparatively orderly. It is tempting to read this as simply rich and poor. But the deeper divide is institutional: the two Karachis are governed by different authorities altogether. The serviced enclaves fall largely outside the elected mayor’s jurisdiction, answering to their own boards and development authorities; the katchi abadis fall between overlapping jurisdictions that each claim a piece and none owns. The physical divide is a map of the institutional one. Encroachment, unregulated construction and the lawlessness that surfaces in the poorer districts are not simply failures of policing — they are what happens where no single authority is answerable for the ground beneath people’s feet. The very ground on which a Gul Plaza is built, drifts from its plan, and finally burns.
Why the diagnosis matters more than the party
My own work on Pakistan’s SME Competitiveness Strategy, alongside the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and the Pakistan Business Council, showed me the mirror image of this. Business leaders in Karachi do not wait for the city government to fix its own fragmentation; they maintain parallel relationships with the province, federal bodies and cantonment boards at once, because no single office reliably controls the decisions that affect them. It is a rational response to a broken system — and, quietly, one reason the system never gets fixed. When elite actors can route around institutional fragmentation, the pressure to repair it never fully builds.
Urban scholarship has a name for this: the political scientist Clarence Stone called it an urban “regime” — the informal arrangements by which public bodies and private interests govern a city together, while formal democratic structures stay weak. Karachi’s particular story is that this pattern has now survived a genuine political earthquake intact.
Because in Karachi the machinery meant to prevent these deaths answers to no single authority that can be held to account for them.
There is a specific legal reason it survives. Buried in the 2021 amendment to the Sindh Local Government Act is a clause — Section 140-A — that lets the province add or remove any function from Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s mandate by simple notification in the official gazette, without new legislation. The same amendment used it to strip KMC of its hospitals, medical colleges and schools overnight — Karachi Medical and Dental College and Abbasi Shaheed Hospital among them — and years on, those functions have not returned. Whatever share of the city a mayor controls in a given year is not a settled fact but a number the Sindh Assembly can revise by administrative notice whenever it judges the moment right.
A new province is not a new answer
The debate has now reached for the biggest constitutional redraw yet: carving Karachi into a separate province. The appeal is easy to understand. A city of more than 20 million people, a global port and Pakistan’s financial centre should not have its affairs managed from the same administrative desk responsible for distant rural districts with entirely different priorities. A government closer to the city it serves promises greater responsiveness, and that instinct should not be dismissed lightly. Yet proximity alone has never been the missing ingredient in Karachi’s governance. The lesson of the city’s recent history is that changing the map does not automatically change accountability. We have already watched two mayors, from opposite parties, inherit the same fragmented authority — powers overlapping, responsibility dispersed, no single office answerable when the system fails. A new province risks repeating that mistake at a larger scale. It would create a governor, chief minister, cabinet, provincial assembly, high court, secretariat and an entirely new administrative apparatus, but none of those institutions, by themselves, guarantee that one identifiable authority becomes responsible for enforcing building codes, maintaining public infrastructure or preventing the next Gul Plaza. Pakistan’s fiscal constraints make this more than an abstract constitutional exercise. Public money should strengthen institutions that produce accountability, not simply finance additional offices without changing how responsibility is assigned and enforced. After decades of commissions, inquiries and promises that rarely translated into consequences, citizens are being asked to place their faith in another institutional redesign. That trust will not be rebuilt by adding another tier of government. It will be rebuilt only when authority, responsibility and accountability finally rest in the same hands.
The lesson of the last two decades is that a better mayor was never going to be enough, because the office itself has no fixed floor. Karachi has tried a boosterish mayor and a conciliatory one, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and both have governed at the pleasure of a clause that lets the province redraw their authority overnight. The fix that would matter is not a masterplan or a coordinating body — Karachi has had study after recommending both but removing Section 140-A’s discretionary switch itself, so that KMC’s functional mandate can only be altered through the same legislative process, and the same public scrutiny, that created it.
None of that is a partisan demand. It would have bound Mustafa Kamal’s authority as firmly as it binds Murtaza Wahab’s today which is exactly why no Sindh government, MQM-aligned or PPP-led, has volunteered to surrender a lever this useful. The clause has already drawn constitutional challenge: Jamaat-e-Islami and the MQM-P have petitioned the Sindh High Court against the amendments, arguing they violate Article 140-A of the Constitution, which obliges provinces to devolve real authority to local government. The challenge exists; what it lacks the sustained public attention that turns a pending petition into a resolved one. A government that can resize the mayor’s job by gazette notification has little incentive to hurry that along.
That clause is why Karachi keeps getting mayors with a title and a shifting job description. Maps can be redrawn; institutions take years to build. And until we understand the difference, no new province will prevent the next Gul Plaza.