On May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, a son was born to John Truman, mule trainer and farmer, and his wife Mattie. They were undecided whether to honour her father or his. In the end they compromised with the letter 'S'. It could be taken to stand for Solomon, or for Shipp, but in fact stood for nothing, a practice known among the Scottish-Irish even for first names. The baby was named Harry S. Truman.
He was schooled locally, but was unable to go on to college, family finances not permitting, and he could not get into West Point because of an eye defect. So he started life as a farmer, served as the local postmaster, worked as a road overseer, and then joined the National Guard. During WW1 Captain Truman distinguished himself in heavy action and was commended for his bravery and other leadership qualities. After the war he became a partner of his haberdashery firm in Kansas City, and slowly, over the post-war years developed an interest in politics.
It was in 1935 that he entered the US Senate as Democratic Senator from Missouri. In the 1944 presidential elections the Democratic Party nominated him for vice-president and on January 20, 1945, a dying Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with Harry Truman at his side, was sworn-in as president for the third consecutive term. Truman's vice-presidency lasted 82 days during which time he met Roosevelt only twice. When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Truman was sworn-in as President of the United States of America. In 1949 he was sworn in for a second term in the White House.
A firm and decisive man with courage that matched his convictions, he was never afraid to take unpopular decisions and to stick to them. A hand-lettered sign on his desk read : "The buck stops here". (Also attributed to Truman is the expression : "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen".)
Firm non-corrupt hands on the tiller is what has been needed for many a year in this unruly nation of 140 million, largely illiterate, inhabitants. There should be, and now must be, no room for flip-flops.
On April 10 2000, our federal minister of finance Shaukat Aziz wrote to Air Marshal (retd) Azeem Daudpota. This letter was reproduced in my column last Sunday. The finance minister is keen to collect money. A delegation of the builders9 mafia had officially called on him and tempted him with the offer of enriching his exchequer by crores of rupees. He was unaware of their reputation and practices; he was ignorant of the environmental problems faced by Karachi; he knew nothing of the all-pervasive corruption that had overtaken each and every official building authority of the city, on a par with the corruption of the builders' and developers' fraternity; so he quickly passed on the buck. He confesses that he was ill-informed.
To the Air Marshal Governor he wrote, ". . . . a review will have to be carried out on a case to case basis and the gross and blatant violations will have to be treated separately . . ." Good old Daudpota was assured that the crores offered by the builders in return for condonation of their violations of the law, and permission to continue with the violations, would flow into the coffers of Sindh.
He inquired into the matter, and found that the committee constituted to look into such affairs had not been able to sort them out. So he reconstituted the committee, naming as convener Tasneem Ahmad Siddiqui, a member of the Governing Body (GB) of Karachi Development Authority. The committee members were three others of the GB - Architect Arif Hasan, Nazim Haji, Commissioner of Karachi Shafiq Piracha - plus Chief Controller of Buildings (CCB) of the Karachi Building Control Authority/KDA.
This committee was notified and formed "to visit each [of 262] sealed buildings and formulate its recommendations in respect of stability of the buildings, state of occupation, environment, state of utility services, status of court decisions and proposed penalty, if regularized, along with the proposed draft notification/ordinance . . ."
Three committee members are government servants and have little choice but to follow the directives of the government and to show acute sensitivity to the prevailing official nuances. Of the three, Tasneem and Shafiq are men of integrity, as are Nazim and Arif. The CCB by tradition established over the past couple of decades has been a man efficient and practised in the arts of corruption. He has always played a part, directly or indirectly, in whatever has been built illegally, unlawfully, wrongly, unsafely, dangerously. The present incumbent has been an officer of the KBCA for some twenty years.
The committee has to submit its report to the governor of Sindh, now Mohammedmian Soomro. It feels it should do so without routing it through the GB of the KDA. Governor Soomro is 'pressing' for this report. He does not have the sign "The buck stops here" on his shiny desk nor does he pretend he is capable of seeing that it stops there.
Tasneem's committee has found that there are a lot more than 262 buildings involved. They will also soon find that the builders who fleeced the people have wound up their businesses and disappeared and have dissolved their 'entities' responsible for the faulty or illegal buildings.
The committee admits it has had no time to go into each case and has had to rely on information fed to it by the CCB. It is recommended that they consult Barrister Naim-ur-Rahman who knows all about the court cases, Barrister Faez Isa, chairman of SHEHRI who has written tomes on the subject, and Citizen Engineer Roland deSouza, also of SHEHRI, who has all the faults and illegalities documented.
The table shown here (courtesy Roland deSouza) concerns just one illegal construction which has been illegally regularized by the Building Controller (BC) and other officers working under the CCB against whom no action has been taken. The same builders have to their record some 30 other buildings constructed in violation of rules and regulations which have in some form or the other been regularized. The most important item are the COS, i.e. the compulsory open spaces round the building, vital for the safety of life and limb, which have not been kept open. Now, who decides where minor infringements end and major begin?
After the military takeover of October 1999, the builder of this building visited the KBCA officers bringing with him a colonel and a major so as to convey the 'right message'. The army officers were assured by Building Controller that there were no violations or deviations and that all was well within the laws. They accepted his certification. All was naturally not well, but within a matter of days, all was 'regularized' for the builder by Building Controller. Business remains as usual.