What can Dhaka mayors do?

For Annisul Huq and Sayeed Khokon, two mayors in the capital, a met office forecast that there will be no more heavy downpours in the current rainy season will be more than welcome.

Another daylong downpour would mean the September 1 deluge again for the city that would also leave them in deep water.

Elected at the end of April, the two mayors who have just passed their honeymoon period had to be in an unenviable situation last week as the one hour downpour left them with an inundated city. People had to suffer terribly due to water logging throughout the day.

The following days brought more unpleasant tastes for Annisul and Khokon. They had to face bitter criticism everywhere -- newspapers, television channels and social media.

But blaming the two for the whole mess is unjustified.

In the matter of city governance, our mayors are hapless to a large extent. They are unable to make a master plan and take drastic measures to free us from water logging. More than a dozen agencies are involved in maintaining the drainage system and the mayors have no control over them.

The mayors also have no control over more than four dozen organisations providing civic service in the capital. The government retains full control over them.  

For example, our mayors have no control over Dhaka Metropolitan Police, Dhaka Water and Sewerage Authority (Wasa), Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha and authorities that supply power, gas, etc.

These single-purpose organisations have been set up under different acts and they belong to different ministries.

Many experts have been arguing for long that this lack of coordination between these bodies has made the situation worse.

This is an old issue. A demand for a metropolitan government to bring all the civic service providers under one authority has been made two decades ago.

Dhaka's first elected mayor in 1994, Mohammad Hanif had proposed first for a metropolitan government to improve city governance.

His son, Sayeed Khokon, who was elected mayor of Dhaka South City Corporation, is now speaking for setting up of the city government.

Annisul, a successful businessman turned public representative, has also spoken for a coordinated system like a city government to handle the problems.

It is interesting that successive governments were aware of the crisis long ago and had taken some half hearted efforts without trying to empower the mayors.

Consider the Dhaka City Corporation Ordinance enacted in 1983 during Ershad regime as an example first.

In the ordinance, chiefs of the service organisations--Rajuk, WASA, DESA and DPHE were made ex-officio ward commissioners of the city corporation. The reason was better coordination among the core service providers.

But the move fizzled out as most of the senior officials who lead those organisations never turned up in the coordination meetings. Some point at bureaucratic vanity or departmental jealousy behind this failure.  

In another attempt, a coordination committee for Dhaka city was formed in 1996 during the AL-led government with the then minister for LGRD as chairman and the then mayor as the co-chairman. Chiefs of various civic service providers and MPs elected from the city had been made members of the committee. Its goal was to ensure better management of services.

The committee held about a dozen meetings until October 1998 and 'some progress' in waterlogged areas and mosquito control were the only outcomes, says an authoritative book: "Megacity Governance in South Asia: A comparative Study" by Kamal Siddiqui and others.

That move failed, according to the book, as the minister was too busy. He was there to exercise his control and not out of any genuine commitment to solve the problems of Dhaka city.

The Minister-led committee ceased to exist when the new Mayor Sadek Hossain Khoka took office in April 2002. The then BNP-led government formed Dhaka good governance committee headed by the principal secretary to the then prime minister. That committee could not make any breakthrough.

In the latest effort, the AL-led government split the Dhaka City Corporation into North and South without even trying to empower the corporations.

The September 1 downpour had once again exposed the vulnerability of the city.

In a positive note, the people's outburst against the mayors should be considered as their high expectations from their representatives.

To meet people's expectations, the city corporations, its mayors, and its councilors must be empowered.

The city corporations should have jurisdictions over the entire governance in the city as it is an effective practice in many democratic countries.

Half-hearted efforts are welcome no more.