EDITORIAL: If Monday’s terrible countrywide electricity breakdown wasn’t embarrassing enough for the power ministry, it was left with yet more egg on its face when it admitted that, days after the problem, it was still clueless about the “exact source of the fault in the system”.
Finally, an interim report has reportedly surfaced that after explaining what happened appears to point to human error. One would think that after eight extensive blackouts in nine years, the ministry would have learned to contain such glitches.
But they keep cropping up because each time the country’s highest authorities take notice and order inquiries, and that is the end of the matter. There are no follow-up investigations and no incompetent heads are made to roll; and so the cycle keeps repeating itself.
This time the prime minister has ordered a three-member committee headed by Minister of State for Petroleum Musaddiq Malik to conduct a safety audit of the whole transmission network, including the possibility of “outside interference” or even hacking, and submit a report within seven days.
“Most of the system is not operating on computers,” said Federal Petroleum Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan, so the possibility of hacking is very low.
Still, it is important to tick this box as well while a thorough investigation is being carried out, but the fault is more likely to be within the system. Either way, the report should be complete by early next week, and it is seriously hoped that no facts will be kept from the public which, after all, pays the highest price for such incompetence and oversight.
As the government looks into the mess that is the power sector, perhaps it will also give some thought to finally picking a chief executive for the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC), which runs the national grid and is currently rudderless.
Somebody should also explain why no qualified professionals have been able to hold the top post for more than a few months over the last decade and a half.
Surely, nobody needs any more proof that career civil servants and the usual political appointees simply do not have the expertise to handle such a complicated enterprise.
And it’s not just the NTDC that suffers from such staffing problems, of course, because this trend can be found all across public sector enterprises and has repeatedly been identified as one of the biggest contributing factors to their decline, inefficiency and losses.
It’s no secret that plugging all unnecessary leakages will be central to the government’s frantic efforts of turning the economy around. If a big part of the official machinery is forced to perform below par only because of political and bureaucratic imperatives, then the country’s rulers will have only themselves to blame for the complete, catastrophic breakdown that is already around the corner.
No country can function without assured electricity, but fixing this sector is only one, though extremely essential, part of the bigger problem. The government needs to immediately roll out an extensive action plan to remove all inefficiencies from all sectors if it is to have even a faint chance of weathering the storm that could well end in a game-changing sovereign default.
Industry struggling to keep up production because of high taxes and expensive and unreliable energy and the government throwing hundreds of billions of rupees into public enterprises as the deficit runs deeper into red every year assures only complete destruction of the economy.
So far the political elite, all across the spectrum, has given much higher priority to the rush for power than giving its undivided attention to saving the economy. If all parties don’t come together to declare an economic emergency even now, then it might become impossible to preserve the country as we know it.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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