Surprising?
Tales of power sector corruption and mismanagement, no matter how extreme, have ceased to surprise people for a while now. They have stopped trusting governments to help them out of this crisis, no matter how loudly politicians shout during election campaigns. Yet NEPRA’s annual report for 2014-15 still made for some sobering reading. It turns out that public as well as private sector power companies not only fouled up generation, distribution and transmission, as usual, but also sent faulty bills to consumers. No doubt the Authority remains unable to its basic job. And the consistent poor performance has now pushed consumers to as for its restructuring.
It is not very clear, though, what good any manner of restructuring will do as long as the government lacks the political will to set matters right. The ruling party complained the most of the power sector ahead of the last general election. Along with expanding the tax net and increasing revenue, it promised streamlining the power sector. But now, half way through the current electoral cycle, it has few answers to ‘orchestrated electricity shortfalls and load shedding’, and instances of unlicensed plants allowed to operate, among a host of other failures.
NEPRA has also allowed increase in DISCO losses by up to 15.3 percent in the power tariff (up from 13.3 percent), causing an additional annual loss of Rs2.1 billion. This, of course, is happening when the government is already under pressure to explain the sudden resurgence of the circular debt; after the mysterious Rs500b one-time unaudited payment ended up in money heaven – with no explanation, of course. It seems the government has a lot of work to do on the power front ahead of the next general election. And with so much wrong with the sector, the remaining two and a half years might not be enough.
