Editorial: The News - 29 June 2013

Fast track

Promises made on the campaign trail have an ephemeral quality about them and often fade away from political memory once power is attained. Unusually, but providentially, the promises – some of them – that the PML-N made about getting on top of the problems in the power sector are being fulfilled with quite remarkable speed. The country has yet to see any relief from the chronic loadshedding that is making life a misery for millions, but it is at least possible to see the process by which power will once again come down the wires. The country was promised a retirement of circular debt within 60 days. But, a significant portion of it will have been retired by this time next week and the rest, hopefully, by the middle of July or thereabouts – well within the 60-day target. Circular debt is a man-made monster, and has its birth in poor management and weak political appointments to jobs that required detailed technical skill sets and top-flight management abilities. It currently stands at Rs506 billion. It will be for the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) to finalise the measures that will then have parliamentary approval.
This is a complex process requiring the raising of financial instruments and the approval of the ECC before any disbursement is made. The plan is to pay the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) Rs250 billion immediately, almost half of the outstanding dues as on May 31 2013. This is enough to jump-start the system, allow the IPPs to settle their own debt and purchase the fuel they need to run power stations. It is hoped that this will induct about 1500-2000MW of currently idle power generation capacity into the system in short order. The ECC is also going to breathe fresh life into the Nandipur Power Project, which has long been mired in a string of essentially petty disputes. This 425MW project may be relatively quickly brought back from the dead as the necessary equipment is already in Karachi incurring demurrage on the dockside. The government says it will waive the demurrage and bulldoze the logjam. For the consumer it is going to mean higher prices, for the producer it is going to mean a switch from ruinously expensive oil-fired powered to more affordable coal and gas powered generation – and that is going to be a significant capital investment for the IPP’s. The question that is being asked on all sides but which is unlikely ever to get a satisfactory answer is – if this can be done now, and so quickly, why could it not be done by the previous government and much earlier in the debt cycle before it reached the levels it is at now? Pakistan need never to have had an energy crisis. Can it be fixed? The trend today is towards a definite-maybe; and the country is a lot closer to at least some relief for everybody than it was six weeks ago.

Confusion reigns

A week after the murder of a group of foreign mountaineers at their camp in Buner Nullah, Gilgit-Baltistan, their killers remain at large. The names of the men said to have carried out the killings were announced on Thursday, and it might have reasonably been assumed that if the local police and other law-enforcement agencies knew the names of those involved then there was a reasonable chance that they knew where they lived, who their families and associates were and where they might be in order that they could be arrested. Yet no arrests have been made as admitted in a brief statement by Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar, who also said that he had received no report from the Gilgit-Baltistan provincial government about the arrest, or imminence thereof, of the culprits. Again it might reasonably be assumed, given the seriousness of the incident, that the interior ministry would at least be receiving daily progress reports – but seemingly not.
Matters are further clouded by the fact that the announcement of the names of those who committed the crime was made by two federal officers of the Gilgit-Baltistan administration who had been suspended by the interior minister within hours of the murders becoming public knowledge. Both the suspended officials – the chief secretary and the inspector general of police for Gilgit-Baltistan – addressed a news conference seemingly without the permission of the federal government; they also apparently did not inform the same of what they told the media. Clearly, something is amiss. The two men had been suspended and the federal government is at something of a loss to explain why they are still at their respective desks in Gilgit, continuing to function in ignorance of their suspension. Both men are federal appointees and appear to be in breach of their terms and conditions of service if they are still at their posts. They can hardly claim ignorance of their suspension given the widespread publicity the matter has received. A clue may lie in reports that both men are popular and supported by the provincial government of Gilgit-Baltistan which is heavily weighted towards the PPP. There are the makings of a clash between the federal and Gilgit-Baltistan governments. At a time when the international spotlight is on Pakistan and what was left of its tourism industry lying in bloody tatters, it is more important that the killers be arrested than there be turf-wars between the different arms of governance. This conflict requires early resolution and the equally early arrest of the culprits. We await developments.