It is what it is
Just the way dams can only store water but not create it, good and effective management could have only delayed the ongoing natural gas crisis, it could not have created the stuff. That is all there is to it; there just isn’t enough gas to go around. Has the present political dispensation been slacking on this front? Yes. The concerned ministry was first the victim of coalition politics and then general cabinet reshuffles. But can this government’s incompetence explain the crisis? No.
In Dr Asim Hussain, the public finds a straight-talking minister for natural resources. They don’t like it. They want to be lied to, like they were when former power minister Raja Parvez Ashraf, much to the chagrin of his bureaucratic staff, kept giving one deadline after the other for the end of electric power load shedding. They might have ridiculed him endlessly for it but the actual date, rumoured to be sometime in 2018, would have been too bitter to swallow.
The public’s resentment at the minister’s grim warning of a month-long closure of a CNG stations did not go down well with the press, even those segments who otherwise decry a lack of candour from government officials.
It was not on this government’s watch when the public was encouraged to switch over to CNG-powered vehicles. The Musharraf regime then sat on the issue of an impending mismatch between demand and supply, spreading a network of stations across the land. The current government, yes, did not stop the glut and perhaps made a few decisions it shouldn’t have on the LPG front.
The reception to correct management is rather interesting. Conventional wisdom would suggest that if a government has to make a choice between the two, you should let the households bear most of the brunt and ensure that the factories get an uninterrupted supply, there being livelihoods to protect. But the media won’t have any of that. It doesn’t even want things to be the other way around. It wants a neither/nor in an either/or situation.
Gas management is something we are going to have to reconcile ourselves to. The opposition parties might rally around the crisis, they might accuse (correctly) the government of incompetence. But they would not be able to provide a solution without taking some unsavoury decisions.
