WAPDA’s summer special

Electricity outages making life miserable amidst record heat

Forty-seven degrees Celsius was the temperature in Lahore. A 29-year-old record had been broken. The question on the lips of citizens getting a taste of their own sweat was: when will the electricity supply be restored? At least six people died of hope in the simmering heat. Some citizens got a little agitated and attacked a few LESCO offices. Perhaps someone, somewhere in the caretaker set up, the Ministry of Water and Power or WAPDA would be listening to their woes. But no respite was to be found and another hot day was spent sweating and using hand fans to provide brief bouts of respite across the plains of Punjab and Sindh.

The protests all over Punjab, including Lahore and Faisalabad, are unremarkable in such a situation. The last year saw worse – and perhaps what is holding people back for now is that there is no one to blame. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) which soared into power in the May 11 elections has yet to take the reins of government – and apart from the magic pill offered by a possible Saudi facility of $15 billion in petroleum products – it comes with no wand to weave over the crisis that is corroding the power sector in Pakistan. The caretaker set ups solution has been to ban air-conditioners in public offices and issue a new dress code of sandals and moccasins –and no socks. Certainly not the most promising of solutions – it has provoked a plethora of jokes on the effectiveness of the caretaker set up.

With the overall power shortage being reported at 7,500MW, it is the ineffectiveness of the caretaker set up to implement its orders that is raising questions about the fiscal health of the state and the bureaucracy. Caretaker prime minister Khoso issued a directive to pump Rs22 billion into the power sector, but the Minister for Power Musaddaq Malik raised the white flag and claimed the Ministry of Finance had only released Rs 5 billion of the said amount. Malik also expressed “their inability to overcome the crisis,” identifying “financial constraints as a major, and incompetence as a minor, hurdle in resolving the issue.” The short term response has been to up the price of electricity. Surely it is a bitter pill for people suffering over 20 hours of power outages to swallow. The chief minister of Punjab in waiting Shahbaz Sharif on Friday upped the pressure on the caretaker set up, asking it to resolve the issue pronto. However, the scale of the crisis awaiting the PML-N at the centre is only just greeting them. Nawaz Sharif’s promise of resolving the power crisis within two years seems too far away, the question is: what does the government have to offer this summer? The WAPDA special this summer is not going down to well and someone will have to explain why the entire Rs22 billion required were not issued? The health of the economy is at stake.