To the streets

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Last time, the public burnt a tyre here, broke a window there, they eked a few months of uninterrupted electricity out of the fiscally-crunched government. They’re at it again. Public patience was going to run out given that their anger was being stoked not just by the frequent outages but for good measure by our populist media whose tendentious coverage of the issue is not helping matters.
Although the problem of load-shedding has persisted in our country for quite a while now, the general public doesn’t have a handle on where the blame lies. The opposition finds it easy – nay finds it positively helpful – to point fingers at the incumbents. The media also finds it easier to do that. After all, ‘New price shock’ makes for a snappier and faster-selling headline than ‘Hard-pressed government gears up for another difficult decision.’
The trouble is the problem is not that easy to explain to begin with. What people hear are little tidbits that make for good sound-bites: that Pakistan has enough generation capacity, there are kickbacks in RPP deals, there is inefficiency in the requisite departments, the government doesn’t control factors like line-losses and theft etc etc. While this is all true, what is not pointed out is also true i.e. that there are structural issues in the sector that can only be sorted out in the long-run, that the government doesn’t have the fiscal capacity to absorb the oil price shocks from the international market, that rationalising tariffs is necessary. Throwing a tantrum will get the public what it wants for a while but will only exacerbate the endemic problems and make them more difficult to solve.
Having said all this, while the government is not totally to blame, it is not totally to be exonerated either. Even if it did not create the problem, it has only worsened in the four years on its watch. It has dealt with it in a lackadaisical manner, caved in to opposition on key decisions and not explored alternate solutions. If this problem contributes to their undoing in the elections, it hasn’t prepared any ground for its successors. If it doesn’t, then they haven’t made their own job any easier.
But at the end of the day, the public scarce cares about facts and figures. What they do care about is missing the last over of an Asia Cup final due to an outage. That pathos is easier to stir up than to reason with. They want light and they want it now.