The Sylhet City Corporation mayor-elect, Ariful Haque Chowdhury, has to deal with big challenges to meet the expectation of the city dwellers.
Experts have observed that the Sylhet city dwellers have chosen 18-party alliance-backed candidate Arif as they did not see expected development activities by the outgoing mayor Badar Uddin Ahmad Kamran, who was the ruling 14-party alliance-backed aspirant in the polls.
Arif has encouraged the city dwellers to dream of change and his slogan ‘change’ played an important role in bringing down his opponent Kamran, who was elected mayor for two times since the erstwhile Sylhet municipality town was upgraded to a metropolitan city in 2002.
‘The citizens will wait to see Arif’s mechanism of change,’ Sylhet Chamber of Commerce and Industry former administrator Faruq Mahmud Chowdhury said.
The business community also took a stance in favour of Arif, also former president of the city BNP and the party’s central executive council member, as Kamran showed utter indifference to freeing the city footpaths from illegal occupation.
‘It was a crucial reason behind the landslide win of Arif alongside Kamran’s failure in addressing water-stagnation, reclaiming the city canals and rehabilitating floating vendors,’ businessperson Nazrul Islam said.
Sylhet Bar Association member Syed Helal Monir said driving out the hawkers from city streets and footpaths would not need any budget.
‘So, first of all, the city people want to see the implementation of Arif’s pledge to free the city roads immediately after his taking over the Nagar Bhaban office,’ Helal Monir said.
But he added that some 25,000 street vendors would not be happy if Arif would take step to remove them without taking proper initiative to rehabilitate them.
Besides, the mayor-elect would also to face difficulties in implementing his major election pledges that include controlling the unplanned urbanisation and traffic congestion, renovating the drainage system, fixing fair of rickshaw and auto-rickshaw and turning Sylhet into a cyber city, the experts have observed.
Arif, however, expressed his determination to face the challenges.
‘My first work is to sustain the belief and confidence with which the city dwellers have voted for me,’ Arif said, adding that he would take all possible steps to implement his electoral promises.
Being contacted, Arif told New Age that he was ready to fulfil all electoral pledges he made to the city dwellers address in phases all problems facing the city people.
‘I will turn Sylhet into a model city,’ the mayor-elect claimed.
-With New Age input
