According to an article in a recent issue of Newsweek magazine, the super rich of the world with dubious sources of income are buying up palatial apartments in all the big cities of the world which they consider to be the safest means of investment for their ill-gotten wealth. This reminds me of the time when revelations of properties abroad of some of our own politicians were made public. When confronted with incisive questioning by our TV anchors, most of such politicians came up with very convenient but flimsy excuses. Thus the minister for water and power in 2009 who had just launched the rental power schemes and had coincidently acquired two apartments in London answered in a TV show that his brothers had some great businesses running in UK which yielded the money for those apartments. Later on, billions of rupees were discovered to have been embezzled in the proposed projects. But nothing has come of all the inquiries in this regard, although one certain fact is that WAPDA has gone bankrupt.
Speaking of WAPDA, there is no doubt that this government department, acting solely on its own, has inflicted irreparable loss on our country’s economy. All the sources of exports and foreign exchange earnings were destroyed as the factories and agricultural productions came to a halt through massive load-shedding, making us more and more dependent on foreign loans. The lenders then exploited our geopolitical position for their own ends and hurled all kinds of ill-treatment at us which brought untold poverty, deaths, and ignorance upon our people.
On the local level, WAPDA, now divided into several so called ‘private companies’, that serve to provide it with protective disguise from chronic infamy is following the same old anti-people policies. Load shedding continues as ever, and it doesn’t care about human life. As pointed out previously several times by the victims, its 11kv lines passing over chungi No 6 residents in Muzaffargarh city have not been shifted because they don’t have the money to pay to MEPCO authorities. WAPDA has suffered the fate of GTS (government transport service) in late seventies which was eaten ‘alive’ by its employees. The day our electricity department and its bureaucracy start functioning adequately, Pakistan will become an economic tiger of Asia, like all those other countries.
MULAZIM HUSSAIN
Muzaffargarh
