THE ill-fated Nandipur power plant finally has an operator, but the good news will not last long. With an 80pc hike in the operational cost granted to the Chinese company that will now assume responsibility for keeping the plant running, one is hard-pressed to figure out the rationale for pursuing completion of this project on such a high-priority basis. That has been the story of this project from the day this government took office and announced that it would complete it at any cost. Finding a party to operate the plant without a blowout in its costs has been the challenge, and now the government is in the position of seeking a review of its tariff so it can meet its new, vastly elevated, operation and maintenance expenditure. A new slogan is being born in Pakistan as more ego-based projects such as Nandipur advance towards commercial operations: if at first you don’t succeed, ask the Chinese.

There was a time in the early 1990s when the government of Nawaz Sharif was caricatured for its propensity to privatise everything. Whatever the state could not do itself, it handed over to the market. That track record gave us a mixed legacy. Privatisation helped bring about a communications revolution in the country as the state monopoly was broken, but failed to bring about a similar revolution in banking and finance. Now we have a new approach. Whatever we cannot manage ourselves, we hand over to the Chinese. Today, Chinese companies are operating our stock exchange, picking up the garbage from the streets of our largest city, and building roads in places where we failed to build them for decades. One wonders what is next. If a population of 200m cannot pick up its own garbage or run its own power infrastructure, can they really expect somebody else to do it for them without ever seeing a bill? Foreign investment is a healthy sign for any economy, and it is amply obvious that there are many projects that will never see the light of day until a foreign partner steps in to execute them. What is sad beyond measure is the fact that we can make an egotistical decision to complete the construction of a power plant, but cannot muster the skill needed to run it afterwards. That is where ego-based decisions get you.

Published in Dawn, February 8th, 2017