Pakistanis Living on Brink, and Often in the Dark

New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

LAHORE, Pakistan — The Taliban may be plotting bombings, and the economy is on the brink. But these days, the single biggest woe tormenting Pakistanis is as basic as an electric light bulb.
Pakistan is in the throes of an energy crisis, with Pakistanis now enduring about 12 hours of power cuts a day, a grueling schedule that is melting ice, stopping fans and enraging an already exhausted populace just as the blast furnace of summer gets started.
In an effort to stem that frustration, Pakistan’s government held an emergency meeting last week, bringing together top bureaucrats from across the country. But instead of easing the problem, it aggravated it, ordering power-saving measures that seemed calculated to smother some Pakistanis’ last remaining pleasures.
“They are playing a joke on us,” said Amina Ali, the mother of a bride at a wedding hall that was under orders to close early as part of the new energy-saving restrictions. Her brother chimed in: “The Pakistani people are a toy in the hands of the government.”The power failures could prove destabilizing if they go unchecked, analysts said. Pakistan badly needs its economy to expand to make space for its bulging young population, and chronic power cuts work against that.
It is a concern for the United States, which is trying to help steady Pakistan’s wobbly finances and keep its democratically elected government afloat. The Obama administration has pledged about $1 billion for energy over the next five years.
The crisis is a snarl of unmet responsibilities, and untangling it will not be easy. It has a cast of guilty characters that goes back years: governments that are incapable of planning ahead; bureaucrats who take bribes; even ordinary people who steal about 30 percent of all the power produced. The tribal areas in the west, for example, have no meters and have never paid for power.
The result is about $2 billion a year in energy that is generated but not paid for. Industry experts said they were skeptical the government had a way to close the growing gap between Pakistan’s demand for power and the energy sector’s ability to produce it.
“There is nobody in Islamabad who is working on a coherent, integrated plan,” said one industry executive who asked not to be identified because he did not want to be seen as being critical of the government. “The discussion just keeps going in circles.”
Which was why it seemed particularly galling when the government ordered stores to be shut at prime shopping time, 8 p.m., and wedding halls closed by 10. Weddings are important entertainment in Pakistan, and go on late into the night, with dancing, lights and finery.
“Should we just sit at home in the darkness and go to sleep?” sputtered Ms. Ali, waiting outside the Mughal-e-Azam banquet hall, whose owners had been warned the night before that it should be closed by 10 p.m. One of the owners, Moazzam Ilyas, was nervously trying to coax the event along, even though at 9:45, the groom had still not arrived.
Here in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, the power failures have been disastrous for small businesses. Ali Raza, a printing press owner, has watched his once-prospering label business sag as power cuts bite into printing time, delaying orders and frustrating clients.
Late last year, he sold two large Swedish presses and fired half his 35-member staff. He has given up much of his upper-middle-class lifestyle, selling his Toyota, quitting his gym and limiting purchases of fruit and meat.
As his life and business shrink, so does his determination to stay in Pakistan. “I should move from here before I have nothing,” he said, sitting in his office next to a blank computer monitor and motionless fan. “Staying means committing suicide.”
Poorer Pakistanis have it worse. In Lahore’s old city, an ancient warren of narrow streets full of cavelike workshops for metal and leather, the sound of circular saws stops suddenly at 4 p.m. Candles are lighted. The only noise is the tapping of hammers.
“There’s no income; we are very worried,” said Mirza Arif Beg, 33, a metal polisher whose family business is collapsing. “We feel helpless. Should we do crime?”
Stealing electricity seems to be an option available mostly to those with enough money to afford a bribe. It also might require some relation to the storied meter men, who are paid a pittance but are reported to live well off the proceeds.
“They have big houses, big cars,” said Muhamed E. Baderi, a plastic-tube maker who said he knew a metal-works company that regularly bribed its meter man to reduce its electric bill. “They know the art of meter tampering.”
Those who cannot afford to bribe have to pay or face being shut off. Muhamed Faqir, a 45-year-old buffalo farmer with five children, said he had to borrow from relatives to pay $50 in bills after his power was cut for eight days this winter.
The energy industry was already beginning to spiral when the current government took office in 2008, and to a large extent, the problem is inherited. Even so, the government and President Asif Ali Zardari are the lightning rods for public anger, which has begun to bubble up in the form of protests in some places in Punjab.
A basement full of cobblers in the old city, when asked to describe where they thought the crisis had come from, could come up with only curse words for their leaders.
The opposition party, led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, has played on that anger, trumpeting the crisis to score political points, analysts said, even though its government’s record in the 1990s was no better.
On Saturday, city government officials marched around Lahore’s most important markets at 8 p.m., demanding that merchants shutter their stores. Men with sticks from the local trade union made the final argument for those who were slow to comply.
“We want to shop,” said a woman glaring at the lowered gates of a shoe store. “People don’t get up early, and it’s hot. Now I’ll have to come back on Monday.”
The restrictions look menacing, but few believe they will last. Follow-through has never been Pakistan’s strong point, and the power-saving measures seemed unlikely to be an exception.
When the groom finally arrived at the marriage hall, it was after 10 p.m., and Mr. Ilyas looked distressed. A thick river of guests inched into the hall for dinner, which had been ready since 7, as a marching band played behind them in the dark.
But by 11, no one had come to shut the hall down. A basic truth about Pakistan had been revealed.
“It will be like this for 10 days, and after that will go back to the way it was,” Mr. Ilyas said. “This is the Pakistani way.”