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EDITORIAL: When you run a power supply system with extremely old transmission and distribution networks that are simply unable to keep pace with rising demand, incidents like Saturday night’s blackout, which engulfed the whole country in an instant, are precisely what you should be prepared for. But that is not to say that the people, or businesses for that matter, should be prepared for it since they had no hand bringing the whole system down to its knees; they just elected the people that did it. And, just to be fair, there’s only so much that a government that has only been around a couple of years can do about such things either. So for once there is at least a little bit of truth in Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI’s) principal narrative, which extends to the blackout as well, that previous governments are really responsible for this mess.

It is true that while PTI’s predecessors did remain pretty focused on power generation, they didn’t give much attention to transmission and distribution at all and flatly refused to entertain anybody that expressed serious concern at the time. And now PTI is left to cut a sorry figure because it’s only natural for the people to blame it all on the sitting government. It’s also just as natural for the opposition to take advantage of it, especially in a politically charged environment like the present. Little surprise, then, that words like “inept” and “incompetent” dominated Sunday morning statements and twitter feeds of opposition leaders as they accused the government of lying to cover its own failures.

And although it’s pretty ironic that some Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) leaders are accusing PTI of not doing a good enough job on the energy sector, it’s not as if the government is entirely free of all blame. Because, as news reports not denied by the government suggest, a human error may have caused the Guddu Power Station to trip, yet the problem was amplified because of poor maintenance, mismanagement and especially the fact that the government has got into the habit of running the power sector ‘on an ad-hoc basis’.

It turns out that chief executives of the three companies ultimately responsible for the breakdown, National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC), Central Power Generation Company (CPGC) Guddu, and National Power Control Centre (NPCC), have not been properly appointed for years. NTDC is without a regular CEO since mid-2017, CPGC hired one on temporary basis from the private sector last year, and NPCC, especially, has been without a full-time CEO for more than a decade. Since the fault at Guddu should have been isolated by NTDC, which controls the national grid, and NPCC monitors electricity flow from power plants to distribution companies (Discos), some of which are also without proper heads for a number of years, there are now loopholes in the chain of command that must be making both a proper investigation and fixing responsibility where it is due somewhat difficult.

It is a little concerning that the prime minister identified energy as the biggest problem facing the country, yet this administration did not even move the few pieces on the board that it could, rather should, have by now. Blaming previous governments may have been right in this particular incident, but that is not going to do much for the people who suffer from such things. The blackout remained, at least in a few parts of the country, well into the beginning of the week. That would have driven up input cost for all sorts of small and medium sized businesses while also doing the same type of damage to the production industry that unannounced power shutdowns always do.

The government must take this breakdown, especially the investigation that will come soon, very seriously and begin the process of implementation of necessary reforms as quickly as possible. If it does not get the ball rolling in the time it has left, it will not be in a position to keep blaming others that came before it. For even if it is right in identifying all that is wrong with the power sector, it will not win any points till it does something about it and makes the kind of difference that can be seen.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021

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