SENATOR Raza Rabbani of the PPP has raised some valid concerns regarding the massive privatisation programme announced by the government.

However, he also needs to tell us how his own party’s track record in managing public-sector enterprises can be considered any better. The PPP has had an ambiguous relationship with privatisation for almost 25 years now.

The party likes to claim credit for the private power policy of 1994, for instance, which has governed almost all the new power-generation capacity installed in the country since that year. It also likes to boast of its success in selling a large stake of PTCL in 1996.

But it has shied away from sale of strategic stakes in large public-sector enterprises of the sort championed by the PML-N and the Musharraf government. It did offer up the Qadirpur gas field for sale in 2008, but then quickly backed away in the face of protests from the Oil & Gas Development Company labour union.

Its 2008 manifesto says the party has “deregulated, decentralised and privatised the economy” but its manifesto from 2013 does not mention these words. The party has flirted with privatisation in the past, but has never consummated the relationship.

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The unfortunate fact that we must face here is that nobody has so far been able to find a way to make our public-sector enterprises work properly. It is understandable for a political party to raise concerns regarding jobs and retrenchment in the wake of privatisation.

It is also important that arrangements be made to safeguard the public interest following privatisation, especially where the electricity distribution companies are concerned because these are monopolies in the distribution of a vital good. In fact, the experience with privatisation thus far suggests that greater emphasis is required in these two areas.

But it is equally important to acknowledge that state failure to operate these enterprises has saddled the taxpayers with enormous costs, necessitating large equity injections, repeated bailouts and the restructuring of loan obligations. In the power sector, these inefficiencies have given us the circular debt, whose rupee cost is now amongst the largest expenditure heads in government finances.

The status quo is clearly unsustainable, and before mounting a strong effort to resist the programme announced by the PML-N government, the PPP would do well to clarify why it failed to put in place a better alternative to privatisation during its stint in power.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2014