Life in Pakistan came to a halt on Monday when a fault in the country’s power generation and distribution system—apparently a voltage surge—left millions without power. Unfortunately, power outages occur frequently in Pakistan; Monday’s outage occurred only three months after another major power outage. The country has experienced eight power outages in the last nine years.
Because entire cities, and sometimes the entire country, are routinely plunged into darkness, even citizen outrage is muted, with most people trying to get through the day as efficiently as possible.
What stands out most in all of this is the authorities’ sheer incompetence in failing to come up with a viable solution to this problem. Almost all political parties use the power sector to criticise their opponents when they are not in power. That changes quickly when they gain power.
Over the years, successive governments have focused solely on increasing generation capacity, failing to recognise the importance of addressing generation and distribution infrastructure issues. The power sector is in debt and lacks the resources to upgrade its transmission infrastructure.
Almost every Pakistani government has gone to the IMF for bailout packages, but little to no work has been done to draught a viable, long-term strategy to bring this vital sector out of crisis. The government is too busy adding more power to the grid through megaprojects to tackle the thankless task of fixing the power distribution system.
While the country’s people have been forced to accept the nightmare that is our electric system, this does not make them immune to the challenges that come with being a powerless country.
Everyone, from hospitals and schools to small businesses, reported difficulty performing routine tasks. The country is already experiencing a gas crisis, which means that most people cannot cook or use heaters to stay warm during the winter.
Every time the country faces a power-related issue, government representatives assure citizens of an investigation to address the underlying causes and ensure that such incidents do not occur again.
But we see the same problem every other year, if not every year. When Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took office, he expressed an interest in resolving the country’s crisis.
However, it appears that politics has triumphed over nearly every serious issue confronting the country, and we are witnessing the same old reactions: this time, PTI politicians are eagerly seizing the opportunity to blame the PDM coalition government for failing to avoid a nationwide outage, perhaps forgetting that their own government had faced the same problem.
The question is not which party is in power, but rather why the country continues to fail to implement structural reforms. In this never-ending blame game, the people of Pakistan are helpless in the middle, unsure of where they went wrong and whether they will ever live in a country without the constant threat of power outages, gas outages, and water scarcity.
The government must reconsider its priorities. Even if this latest incident can be attributed solely to technical flaws, it could be a foreshadowing of a very dark future.
