Apropos your editorial on PIA falling apart, not because of lack of marketing potential, but criminal incompetence and a corrupt management, placed at helm by successive governments for past decade. For an airline to survive and prosper, all that is needed is to develop a market for passengers and cargo, a credible automated reservation and accounting system and a choice of vendors located along its domestic and international network for essential technical spares, with a disciplined workforce recruited on merit, working under qualified professionals with integrity monitored by an independent Board of Directors. While PIA had an assured loyal clientele of passengers with abundance of revenue, successive governments have destroyed its capacity to function, through institutionalized corruption via its cronies placed at top. This is a country where even Umrah pilgrims were fleeced and those responsible are still at helm in PIA.
Mere injection of financial bail outs, without weeding out well entrenched corrupt mafia, with visible conflicts of interest and an established history of financial misappropriation, there is no way PIA can be turned around. It will go the way of PSM, where billions of rupees have gone into that bottomless pit, while few like Riaz Laljee and former CEOs have benefitted.
The recent PPP tenure was last nail in PSM coffin, when an overstaffed organization was further bogged with excess employees recruited without merit, and no concrete credible plans to plug pilferages and boost production. PIA is facing same fate and this government has placed both PIA and CAA under control of controversial person, whom Supreme Court under CJ Iftikhar Chaudhry had objected to. The national airline is functioning with acting MDs, most of them who were part of problem and cannot offer a solution.
When indiscipline reigns supreme and corruption is rewarded, than organizations irrespective of their business potential collapse and this is exactly what is happening to PIA. The unfortunate reality is that State Owned Enterprises are collapsing whether country is being ruled by politicians, whose own business empires are prospering, or by dictators associated with institutions running successful corporate business ventures. As long as this culture where public funds and tax payer money is considered spoils of war, there is no hope. It would be better if PIA is privatized.
MALIK TARIQ ALI
Lahore
