Pakistan: Load shedding after the mandate

By: Syed Mansoor Hussain

What the new government is doing is what all governments do when they have no immediate response to a crisis. They divert attention Something is just not right with this load shedding business. We were told that ‘circular debt’ was the real culprit. The new Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government insisted that once the circular debt was settled, electricity would flow like the proverbial milk and honey in paradise. With great alacrity, the new government then paid up the circular debt to the tune of almost Rs 500 billion (close to $ five billion), yes billions with a B. And that is the amount of money our Minfin is begging the IMF to give us! This raises a few questions. First of course is that even after settling the debt, I am sitting in Lahore and the load shedding is so bad that my UPS just died. I am sure that the new masters of our country must have known that paying up all the money to settle the circular debt would not fix the power shortage, at least for us ordinary folks. The question then is, why the urgency to pay up the money owed to the Independent Power Producers (IPPs)? Whenever I put this question to people ‘in the know’, I always get the same answer: you know who got paid and you know why. This response is almost always accompanied by a smirk and a wink. The Prime Minister (PM) said that it will take at least four years to bring electricity generation up to ‘snuff’ and then our minister of load shedding in a moment of impolitic candour said that load shedding was due to technical reasons. These two statements from the two people in ‘the know’ clearly suggest that even at best our maximum possible power generation at this time is not enough to fulfil present national needs, the extravagant claims of the PML-N before the elections notwithstanding. Power production from hydel sources is constrained by the amount of water available in our rivers and how much of it needs to be stored for irrigation. And most of our privately owned power generation plants (IPPs) that run on diesel or furnace oil have crossed well into the ‘age of superannuation’. If these power plants were employees of the Punjab government, our chief minister would have forcibly retired them by now. Most of these plants are inefficient and even at best work at a percentage of capacity. New plants will take a few years to build, which is why the PM mentioned the three to four years required to take care of our power shortage. As far as coal is concerned, all I can say is, dream on. What the new government is doing is what all governments do when they have no immediate response to a crisis. They divert attention. The big deal now is finding and arresting ‘power thieves’. This is obviously akin to the ‘gladiator’ games in ancient Rome and will be used to divert the attention of the poor, downtrodden, electricity-deprived people of this country. Every so often a few factory owners or other semi-big names will be ‘thrown to the lions’ in the arena in the hope that the ordinary people will be amused and hopefully forget about their problems. But electricity theft starts at the very bottom; it involves the poor and others that just steal electricity because they can. If you go after all of them, especially in the slums of Karachi or Lahore, in the outer reaches of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces or in the interior of Sindh, you probably will have an armed insurrection on your hands, which neither this government nor any government before this had the appetite to take on. The largest number of electricity thieves are our ‘middle class’ and the small businesses who also happen to be the primary vote bank of the PML-N in Punjab. An average household with a couple of air conditioners generates an electricity bill of anywhere between Rs 20 and 30,000 a month during summer. They pay the ‘meter reader’ Rs 5,000 every month and get a bill of much less than Rs 10,000. As such they save more than Rs 10,000 on the electricity bill. Of course, the Rs 5,000 the meter reader gets per household is distributed all the way up the ‘food chain’. The same is true of small businesses that have to pay a commercial rate that they can hardly afford. So if you want to catch and punish the real ‘thieves’, you will have to put almost the entire bureaucracy involved and much of the PML-N vote bank that participates in it in jail. If we accept that all electricity theft ends and bills are actually paid based on real consumption, will that end load shedding? Of course not, since the total amount of electricity being produced will still be below our national requirement and whatever moderate increase there is will be diverted to the factories whose owners are mostly PML-N’s financial supporters. The other thing that might happen is that our electric supply companies just might become ‘profitable’, especially if the government keeps increasing the ‘price’ of electricity. If that happens, the government can then sell these now profitable electrical supply companies to the ‘new class of crony capitalists’. As far as ordinary people are concerned, they will still face serious load shedding for the foreseeable future. And that brings me to our late Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government. It had the right idea that the only way to alleviate the power shortage in the short term was the Rental Power Plants (RPPs). But then as was the PPP government’s wont, it got involved in corruption, kickbacks and crony capitalism. A good idea was thus brought to naught. Even so, if any of those RPPs are still functional, perhaps they should be allowed to work and add to the amount of electricity that is added to the national grid.