Why Karachi needs speed breakers, phone jammers

If you happen to have bought yourself a zippy new automobile in Karachi and hope to rip it up and down the streets of Clifton and Defence, the two neighbourhoods where purchasers of such desirables will be comfortable driving their beauties, good luck. Although they promise wide streets, and a long, unclogged version of Bombay's Marine Drive, called Sea View, you might have to venture out to reclaimed sea territory to step on the pedal.
Instead, you might want to lock up your gleaming acquisition and cover her up at night; you never know who is watching and planning. Karachi is not as unsafe a city as you might imagine, reading the reports in the press but it's also not winning any prizes for safety.
Two issues prevent Karachi's elite from enjoying the pleasures of success: One, ever increasing, oddly designed speed breakers and large blocks of cement plonked onto the street forcing you to carefully zigzag your way through to the other side; and two, a rise in kidnapping forays conducted by various kinds of small-time criminal and terror outfits.
Speed breakers have a cruel way of killing a joy ride but drive through this city's southern streets and you'll find it easy to pinpoint where the powerful live; outside each PPP or MQM leaders house you'll find a staff of security personnel and the unavoidable chunks of cement blocking easy public access. Now that is just plain rude.
They are fat, ugly chunks of concrete putting pressure on probably not-the-best tarred roads, and causing the entire city a great deal of inconvenience. Officials call them security measures, as they patrol about the city with much ado.
You can't blame the small fry - after all a security cordon and detail is a status determiner. And if leaders set the standards, then no one can compare to the sorry state of the country's president, Asif Ali Zardari, who has bunkered up Bilawal House, his rather ugly Karachi mansion, to such an extent that he has absorbed the entire public road. Jammers mean that local residents have to use landlines, not cellphones. Two series of thick concrete wall make this look like a mini version of the wall Israel has built to 'protect' itself from the Palestinians. I'm not sure I would elevate myself - through complex series of negotiations and power-broking - to lead the country if I was so scared of death.
Amazingly - or out of fear - Karachiites don't protest. When he was in Karachi recently, he not only blocked the street, but the entire locality. Pashtun truck drivers said their trucks were taken by force, drained of diesel and used to block off a 4km territory so that the president could sleep in peace.
Sadly, he's not the only culprit. The MQM - a mafia of another variety - calls strikes with such determination that no one dares to question the loss of business or work for that day. Quietly for fear of being felled by a stray bullet or a targeted attack for refusing to obey, the citizens of Karachi stay home. Sadly, the problem is that this city is run by two parties who don't care for safety. The PPP is corrupt and inefficient and the MQM is criminal. The newly sworn in Rabita Committee deputy convener, Khalid Maqbool, did - once again - resort to his party's typical gang-land style of ops. He said the MQM did not want Karachi to separate from the rest of the country but if his party-workers were targeted, there could be another 1971. "We would not be able to control the situation, then," he said.
The writer is a Delhi-based Pakistani journalist