Defaulting govt departments

EDITORIAL: How ridiculous that government departments, ministries, even provincial governments, routinely default on their payments to power companies, leaving them to book losses, take loans to meet running costs, and inevitably burden ordinary consumers at the end of the day.

And if there is a way of snapping out of this regular cycle, nobody seems to have found it yet because, no matter how you approach it, the solution will require defaulters to make payments on time. But that, it is already abundantly clear, will need some sort of a miracle.

So, once again KE (K-Electric) has had to forcefully caution the Sindh government that any further delay in payment of Rs9 billion in reconciled bills – which includes dues pending for more than a year – will result in “massive power breakdowns and disconnections” in Karachi.

Such situations have so long since become the new normal that nobody even asks some basic questions anymore. For example, how is it that the provincial administration, which exists to serve the people and must return to them for votes, just does not bother to pay its bills even when it knows better than anybody else that the cost of its excesses will be directly paid by the power company and eventually taxpayers?

Also, now that we have once again reached the point where the power company begs for its dues, how long should it take the government pay and get matters back on track, however late in the day? And it’s not like it’s just the residents of Karachi that pay for such neglect whose suffering also echoed very loudly in the national assembly just the other day, but to no avail.

Headlines also speak of Iesco (Islamabad Electric Supply Company) helplessly issuing a list of ministries/organisations/departments that are defaulters of billions of rupees. In the end it “requested” heads of all defaulting official institutions to pay their outstanding electricity bills.

That makes it clear enough that it’s not just all the inefficiencies, incompetence, theft and corruption within the power sector that ordinary people must suffer, it is also that the government itself is a chronic defaulter and a very, very big part of the problem.

Now power companies are rightly warning that everybody is in for a very rough time largely because the government is cramping their operational space. KE, for example, has been crying hoarse that it needs the money the government is not paying to upgrade its system, without which it is the company’s working, its earnings, its reputation, and common consumers that will suffer.

One can only hope that the problems that can be solved, like the government paying its bills on time, will finally be solved. The system has been crippled and the people fooled and insulted long enough. When the government itself plays with the law, it’s no wonder that a lot of people feel free to do the same as well. These problems should not have existed to begin with, now they must be solved without wasting any more time.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024