Night power outages in different areas of the city, especially localities of blue collar workers, have been tormenting hundreds of thousands of citizens, depriving them of their basic human right of sleep.
Night power outages in hot weather is really a nuisance for womenfolk, old people and children who live in congested houses of Karachi in low income areas. They also face attacks of mosquitoes when their ceiling fans stop due to outages. This is one of the reasons dengue and malaria cases are exceedingly high in the slum and low income areas of Karachi.
Increased load shedding coupled with steep rise in electricity tariff after controversial privatization of state-run electricity distribution entities including the KESC is the curse of modern times slapped on the citizens of Pakistan by incompetent rulers of the past. However, Pakistan can take serious steps to end this menace and learn from the experience of South Africa which has announced to end the tormenting load shedding for good.
The other day South Africa President Jacob Zuma and power utility Eskom assured their nation that there would be no load shedding. For the past nine months, the country has not experienced any power cuts following months of unreliable power supply that crippled the economy and left ordinary citizens frustrated.
President Zuma says he can now confidently declare that load shedding is the thing of the past. “We believe we need to come and see what is happening. I was saying to the management and leadership of Eskom that we are close to finishing a year without load shedding and I tell people that we are not going to have load shedding anymore.”
However, it needs courageous exposure of past and present corruption and bungling in the privatisation of state-run electricity distribution entities, using full installed capacities of power generation of the privatised entities, ending their malpractices like super-fast meters, irrational tariffs, electricity pilferage, and charging honest bill payers the units stolen due to inefficiency of power distribution entities. Pakistan is the only country of the world where losses of stolen electricity is recovered from the honest electricity consumers who pay their full bills.
