Saeed Ghani is Sindh’s Local Government Minister, responsible for whether Karachi’s buildings stand, its water reaches homes, and its hospitals are safe. By his own government’s record, he has failed at all three, and instead of owning it, he reaches for a conspiracy theory.
Twenty-seven people died when Fotan Mansion collapsed in Lyari in July 2025, a building his own Sindh Building Control Authority had declared dangerous years earlier. Notices were issued; nobody enforced them. That’s not propaganda; it’s SBCA’s own paperwork, while 588 buildings citywide, 107 in Lyari alone, wait their turn.
So when the minister suggests Sindh’s grievances are manufactured by outside forces, I ask directly: when did ISPR ever demand Sindh become a new province? That demand comes from residents buying water from tankers because the province admits a roughly 50% supply gap, and from families whose children tested HIV-positive at Kulsum Bai Valika Hospital because sterilisation and infection control simply weren’t there. This was never a conspiracy; it’s bad governance PPP has owned since 2008. And whenever real accountability is due, PPP pushes JSQM and other Sindhi nationalist groups to the front of protests so its own name never appears in the headline. That is not accountability. That is outsourcing anger so the party running the ministries never has to sit in the dock.
This is a pattern, not bad luck. In 2006, the City District Council he sat on cancelled twelve “ghost” petrol station leases amid nepotism accusations and lost public revenue. In 2017, the Sindh High Court restrained him from exercising ministerial powers he had no legal right to as a mere adviser; he resigned rather than answer the case. In 2019, with roughly 60% of Karachi’s garbage uncollected, his government paid citizens Rs100,000 to film it, as if a phone camera could ever substitute for a functioning sanitation department. In 2021, his department was accused of paying nearly triple the market rate for school desks, with some Rs3 billion allegedly gone, and he pointed at a committee. In 2023, his own party’s local body election win came wrapped in rigging accusations from three opposition parties.
In 2026, he admitted on camera that his own organisation had swallowed over Rs20 billion in corruption, said the officials involved were transferred, and claimed he was under pressure for pushing accountability. Forgive me if I do not applaud a man for discovering, years into his own ministry, that the department he runs has been hollowed out from the inside the whole time he was running it.
Then there’s what everyone already knows: 78 children confirmed HIV-positive at a hospital under his department, six deaths recorded in the inquiry coverage, 37 officials eventually suspended, after the damage was done. Ghani himself constituted that first inquiry as the responsible Labour Minister at the time. Eight SBCA officials were arrested after Lyari, and it took his own party colleague Nabil Gabol to call SBCA the city’s most corrupt department and ask whether the minister should resign. He didn’t. He held a press conference, blamed negligence elsewhere in the system, and kept his ministry.
This is the same minister who told Karachi in 2022 that residents magnify their problems a hundredfold, about the same water, drainage, and waste failures now on his desk. Rs74 billion is allocated to his department, another Rs60 billion for foreign-funded schemes, yet K-IV, the project his government touts as proof of progress, sat roughly 50% complete as of March 2025, with the in-city distribution network not even tendered. That is not a plan. That is a press release with a deadline nobody in his department has to answer for. Real relief may not reach residents until 2028 or 2029.
I’m not adjudicating every NAB thing. But the test that matters isn’t a courtroom verdict; it’s whether a minister protects citizens before disaster strikes, not after the bodies are counted. On that test, Ghani has failed, repeatedly, on his own government’s record.
Blaming ISPR doesn’t answer for Lyari, for Valika Hospital, for Rs20 billion vanished, or for a water project still years away. Karachi isn’t confused about who governs it. It’s simply done being told its suffering is someone else’s script, and that excuse just expired.
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