SAY you walk into a store to buy a packet of milk. While you are well within your rights to expect that the shopkeeper won’t stock an expired or otherwise defective item to foist onto an unwary consumer, it is also your responsibility to exercise due diligence and check the packet’s expiry date. The same goes for other foodstuffs, medicines and so on.

When it comes to more capital intensive purchases, the importance of such diligence increases but so does the difficulty in actually carrying out such diligence.

If you’re buying a car, for example, you could take it to a trusted mechanic who could (one hopes) uncover any major defects.

What sort of diligence is needed when buying an apartment?

But what if you were to purchase or lease an apartment in one of the many such building projects in Karachi? What sort of diligence should you be expected to carry out? Certainly you can ask the builder to show you the land documents and no-objection certificates but how are you to determine if that documentation is a forgery? How are you meant to find out if the land on which said building is constructed is not the subject of a legal dispute? How can you know if that NOC was obtained through the greasing of palms?

Most of the time, you can’t. There are few Alexanders among us capable of cutting through the Gordian knot of red tape, nor will most of us find an Ariadne capable and willing to help us navigate the labyrinth of bureaucracy.

It can be done, sure, but only by someone with well-placed contacts and/or a superhuman level of patience and will.

One can say with a high degree of certainty that there were no such people among those unfortunate souls who chose to make their abodes in Karachi’s Moon Garden Apart­ments. At most they must have been flashed an official-looking document and walked away with the belief that such a well-advertised project could not possibly be illegal. If it were, why would the government allow it? Why would the courts not take action?

Well, the court did take action in 2008 when the Sindh High Court ordered the attachment of the property, a judgement the builder appealed in the Supreme Court, which discharged the attachment order on the undertaking that the builder would not raise additional floors or hand over possession to anyone without obtaining an NOC. The builder reneged on this undertaking with absolute impunity.

It has been suggested that the government should maintain a website where one can access land and legal records in order to determine the status of any given property. While this is a wonderful idea, it ignores the fact that such fraud cannot take place without the connivance of builders, government officials, bureaucrats, law-enforcement officials and local political leaders.

Any crusading official who dared take on such a task would soon find himself transferred or sidelined. Or worse. There is a Council of Architects and Town Planners which scrutinises the licences of builders, architects and engineers. However, according to one of its members, the committee tasked with this has not held a single meeting in several years. When cases were brought to the committee it would simply defer hearings and grant temporary licences in the interim. That then is the state of governmental and semi-governmental organisations.

But what if a determined citizen or advocacy group were to attempt this mammoth task of investigative documentation? The likelihood is that they would not be long on this earth. The ‘na maaloom afraad’ would ride up to them while they drive home and turn a living human being into a statistic.

That’s what happened to the legendary Perween Rahman who, in the days leading up to her murder, had been documenting land use around Karachi. Abdul Ghani, who fought against the land mafia encroaching on mangroves near Karachi’s Kukkapir village, was also gunned down. One does not threaten the multi-billion-rupee land mafia without consequence.

The Moon Garden issue, thanks to media coverage, attracted the attention of Karachi’s politicians who were quick to arrive at the scene. Local bodies elections are ongoing of course, and points have to be scored. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as their determination lasts beyond the photo ops and polls.

The PTI for its part has submitted a resolution in the Sindh Assembly against the builders of Moon Garden and government officials involved in the scam, and this at least is an appreciable move. But there are hundreds, if not thousands of Moon Gardens in Karachi; the illegal economy of this city is built upon fraudulent land transactions involving an intricate web of collusion, patronage and crime.

One can hope that this web will eventually be unravelled, that Moon Garden can serve as a test case. But we have seen far greater frauds and crimes pass without comment or action. This too shall pass. Let the buyer beware.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2015

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