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AS a blistering heatwave skewers southern Pakistan, a blame game and shouting match has broken out amongst the political leadership to deflect responsibility and settle a few scores. To complicate matters, large-scale load-shedding around the country has also caused an uproar, and both issues are now getting commingled. On Wednesday, the National Assembly saw this blame game and confusion play out clearly in an exchange between the minister, water and power, Khawaja Asif and the leader of the opposition, Khursheed Shah. Both of them had different agendas.
The minister was reeling from days of intense criticism over prolonged load-shedding across the country. The uproar reached absurd heights when the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa stood in his own provincial assembly and roared that he would himself burn down the offices of the Peshawar Electric Supply Company if power supply to the province was not improved.
The leader of the opposition, Mr Shah, on the other hand, was reeling from days of intense criticism focused on the provincial government of Sindh, ruled by Mr Shah’s party, for its casual response to the intense heatwave that has killed more than 800 people thus far. And to add to the embarrassment of the provincial authorities, their nemesis of late, the Rangers, were receiving kudos for setting up relief camps for those suffering from heatstroke, a step the provincial government failed to take.
The whole debate missed the point that the deaths from heatstroke were only marginally related to electricity.
So both men, reeling from their own embarrassment, ended up locking horns in the National Assembly. Mr Shah blamed the ministry for failing to control the load-shedding and for making outlandish promises to end the load-shedding every so often. According to Mr Shah, by failing to provide electricity to the cities of Sindh, and he included K-Electric in his own tirade, the federal government was responsible for the deaths of so many people due to heatstroke.
Not so, countered the minister. Supplying electricity to the city of Karachi was not his responsibility, he replied, and cited the failure of Karachi’s civic agencies to clear their dues with the power utility, as well as an agreement between the utility and the government signed in 2009 that imposed stiff payments for a ‘tariff differential subsidy’ to K-Electric as reasons why the utility was turning into a drain on federal resources while failing to live up to its obligation to generate its own electricity to meet the city’s needs.
He went on to make a list of the recoveries from various distribution areas around the country, which appeared to show that besides Punjab, everybody else was defaulting on their power bills in massive quantities. Without credible cash flow statements it’s hard to believe that recovery rates in Punjab are as good as the minister claims.
And these gentlemen were not alone in this debate. On the Sindh Assembly premises, the provincial finance minister, Mr Murad Ali Shah, vented an angry tirade against K-Electric as well, as other members of the provincial government threatened to hold sit-ins outside the power utility’s offices.
In any case, the whole debate missed the point that the deaths from heatstroke were only marginally related to electricity. Of all the hospital sources cited in the papers, only one attributed the deaths in any significant measure to electricity load-shedding. In JPMC emergency, for instance, that has recorded more than a third of all the deaths, the tireless head of emergency, Dr Seemin Jamali, told a reporter that “a significant number of drug addicts and street beggars” were amongst the toll. Other than that, elderly people were in a state of dehydration at home. Doctors in other hospitals confirmed that the deaths were concentrated amongst those who were ill, or were elderly or were fasting and did not rehydrate themselves in time.
Shortages of electricity have not helped, certainly. Widespread outages were reported throughout Karachi, even though the company put out statements saying only 2pc of the feeders had any problems while 98pc were working fine.
Again, this claim is difficult to believe just based on what one has seen and experienced, with widespread complaints of outages on social media as well. The power company’s glib little PR campaign to tout its successes in turning the entity around needs to be humbled by the simple fact that the company’s infrastructure tends to crumble whenever touched by an exogenous event like a heatwave or thunderstorms and rain. Whatever turnaround has been achieved in the K-Electric’s financials clearly lacks depth and resilience.
Nevertheless, while the minister and the leader of the opposition debated over the complications of ensuring uninterrupted electricity supply across the country, the fact remains that those most vulnerable to heatstroke and those who lost their lives would have been helped by timely rehydration. What prevented this from happening is more complex than just power failures. It connects with Ramazan and people’s notions about when it is alright to break one’s fast to save one’s health, with access to water, and with pressures to have to work outdoors on a daily basis.
Addressing this complex mix of factors is not rocket science. It would have taken dozens of relief camps around the city, featuring shade, drinking water and ORS salts, intravenous drips to rehydrate those severely affected. If the political parties can run iftar camps, why can’t they set up relief camps of this sort?
This is not new. Remember the petrol crisis? The same blame game happened back then too, with the government claiming it was due to factors beyond their control while everybody else piled it up on them for mismanagement. Every crisis sees the same pattern. It is high time some maturity settled in, and it is high time the Sindh government learned that governing includes formulating responses to emergency situations. It is sad that this lesson has not sunk in with the party that gave us the 18th Amendment.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2015
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