THE two-member commission appointed by the prime minister to investigate the recent petrol crisis has blamed the bureaucracy for the shortage, but has absolved everybody of ministerial rank.

The report produced by the commission gives different reasons in different places for why the crisis happened at all.

In one place it says the crisis was “a result of structural issues and not only an event-driven situation”; in another it openly speculates that private-sector oil marketing companies “may also be involved in creating this artificial shortage”.

Also read: Petrol crisis: ‘a very serious governance failure’

In yet another place it says the crisis “has a lot to do” with lack of fuel payments from the power sector, but then quickly brushes away these concerns saying “this is not a unique situation for the PSO”.

This is strange, considering that the strongest empirical evidence before the commission was indeed the power sector receivables, which they acknowledge stood at Rs171bn.

This may not be a “unique situation” for the company, but defaulting on LCs is, and those defaults had begun long before the crisis arrived at the pumps, meaning the liquidity situation was getting difficult very early on.

Yet the commission prefers to resort to speculation when assigning blame, saying for instance that “foul act” on the part of the OMCs “cannot be ruled out”.

If such foul play “cannot be ruled out”, on what evidence can it be alleged? How solid is the evidence that the “foul act” was indeed responsible? In fact, in the absence of solid proof, the commission has invoked a speculative reason to try and deflect blame away from the sorry state of PSO finances towards some other, as yet unproven, cause.

Beyond speculation, the commission has also indulged in wishful thinking, when blaming the lack of storage capacity for the crisis. If the commission wants us to believe that the PSO management is at fault because “[n]o efforts were made to manage 20-day required stock”, they need to answer a simple question first: when has Pakistan ever maintained three weeks worth of fuel stocks?

The whole report reads like a list of hastily made-up reasons for why responsibility for the crisis must rest only with those operating the oil supply chain machinery.

The overriding question is whose job was it to oversee all these officials named in the report and to ensure that they were working together to accomplish their objective?

And if nobody wants to assume that responsibility, can we at least know who appointed so many supposedly inept people to operate the oil supply chain? What steps were taken by the federal government when the crisis was brewing in late December?

All views of the crisis eventually lead towards cabinet-level accountability, and it appears that the entire purpose of the commission report has been to pre-empt precisely this.

Published in Dawn January 28th, 2015

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