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A three-year-old boy fell into an open manhole near NIPA in Gulshan-i-Iqbal on Sunday and drowned. It took at least 15 hours to find his body, courtesy the combined cocktail of the blame game, a lack of rescue machinery in the area and the public coming forward to help collect funds when all else failed.

When asked about the incredibly horrific state of our city’s roads and the fact that people are dying from merely walking on streets in Karachi, the mayor displayed a chilling lack of empathy, raging instead against a journalist for asking a question and launching into a diatribe against the opposition.

We’re not asking Murtaza Wahab to solve Karachi’s problems in a day, but we are saying that we need the mayor of our city, Pakistani’s largest city, Pakistan’s highest tax-paying city, to have some basic empathy for a life cut short far, far too soon.

During the press conference on Monday, Wahab kept bringing up politics. A journalist said, “It would have been better for you to go there [the site of the incident] rather than stand here. Instead of being here, you should have gone and seen the sewage situation at NIPA first. The road is blocked, people are sitting in the street, and above all, the cries of this mother are rising to the heavens, but are they reaching the ears of those in power?“

Hitting back, Wahab criticised the reporter and said that it would have been better if “you focused on the question rather than making a speech”.

“You said that if this matter reaches the rulers, I am part of the government and I am here. This back-and-forth is exactly why our issues remain unresolved,” he claimed.

“The road is still blocked because people are trying to draw attention to their grievance. If the parents’ problem can be resolved, then they should definitely keep it blocked. Some in the opposition may see it differently, but as mayor, I do not. I could have cancelled this press conference, but this is my city and my responsibility. I won’t play the blame game, even though I could. I am taking responsibility.”

He then commented, “I have responded to the Almighty, to you, and to the public. The way things are done is not right. My Lord knows my intentions and my work, and I’m sure Lord knows yours [intentions]. So let neither of us judge the other; that would be better.”

From his words, it was evident that the mayor doesn’t want to be questioned about the city’s state of affairs. He would rather we be grateful to him for showing up to a press conference. He seems to have forgotten that he is an elected representative; that he occupies his position by virtue of the people of Karachi who may or may not have voted for him and that he is doing no one any favours by showing up for a press conference.

This kind of rhetoric has unfortunately become emblematic of our politicians of late. They speak of democracy but forget that leaders in a democracy are answerable to the people. They do not act like irritable autocrats, brushing off all critique as unwarranted nuisance.

Wahab’s demand not to bring politics into the matter was interesting, if you take interesting to mean absurd in this context. Since when has asking valid questions about the safety of children on our streets who are always at risk of death by manhole or dumper truck, become ‘political’?

Karachiites deserve more than being told their questions about the state of their city are ‘political’ or for their lives to be treated like just another statistic. We live in one of the largest cities in the world, consistently ranked among the least liveable in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit. As some pointed out on X, Karachi’ites are born to be crushed by dumper trucks, shot dead by mobile phone snatchers, killed in robberies, blown to bits in blasts or drowned after falling in open manholes.

In the latest case, even as Edhi has confirmed that the child’s body was found by a young boy, the KMC denied this, taking credit where none was due. The official X account for the KMC even shared a jarring and incredibly distasteful and frankly inhumane video of the child’s body being hoisted up as ‘evidence’ in their rush to claim credit. This is not the time to gloat for a job poorly done; it’s time to reflect on why it took so long to find the body, why there was an open manhole outside a busy supermarket and why our children keep dying.

We’re not asking for the investigation into this tragedy to be completed right this minute, nor for the KMC and mayor to accept the blame for something they have not done — we’re asking for empathy. A child died. A little boy who had his whole life ahead of him, who should have been able to safely walk on the streets of his city and whose death should be met with the horror it deserves.

That horror should extend to all preventable deaths in the city — people killed by speeding trucks, burned to death in buildings that have become death traps and because fire fighters are underfunded, falling in uncovered gutters or being crushed when illegally constructed buildings collapse. All these deaths are the result of a failed system that allows instances like this to continue unchecked, swept to the backs of our minds until another person dies and the cycle of pointed fingers, callous rejoinders from government officials, and public outrage starts all over again.

People have a right to be angry, Murtaza Wahab. When children die, people will be furious and no one owes you or your government kind words or sweetly-worded queries. If you can’t force yourself to muster a proper response, one that shows a little empathy and basic human decency, then perhaps this isn’t the job for you.

This isn’t the first case nor will it be the last, not until the people who rule Karachi start treating it and its inhabitants like they’re worth saving, not just headlines in a newspaper that is tossed in the trash after you’re done reading it.