Daily Times

Winter is still at least a couple of months away, at least in most parts of the country, yet both Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) and Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) have warned of gas shortage in Sindh as well as Punjab, which puts consumers and businesses in a very tight spot. And how good did the Federal Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan look when he forewarned about this problem as far back as August this year? Aren’t ministers supposed to solve pressing national problems in the interest of the people rather than take comfort in the fact that most people have been warned ahead of time about what is surely going to be a disastrous situation for them?

How long will Pakistan be a state that struggles to provide electricity to its consumers in the hot summer months and runs out of gas well before the onset of winter? The present government can blame previous dispensations all it wants, and it is not entirely wrong, but someone will have to take the first step towards reforms sometime. And in that the blame game will be little good for anybody, especially the common man who has grown sick and tired of one government looting them and the other blaming it for all the country’s problems.

The point is that whatever the real reform process is going to look like and whoever is going to implement it, it will have some salient features. And if the government really has worked out a reform program, it would know what steps number one, two and three, for example, are. Then why does it not take those steps instead of blaming everybody else for all the problems when everything breaks down? Now the gas shortage will not only trouble residential consumers, who will suffer to no end, it will also prove to be a big handicap for industry. Naturally, when there is power shortage a lot more input money has to be put into the production process; and that only raises the price of the end product. When such concerns spill over into products and matters related to exports, our things are just priced out of the international market. And when such issues begin to become more troublesome when they start to impact the economy, the government simply goes back to its blame game. The PTI government has been in power for almost half its term. So far it has not been able to overcome some of the people’s most basic problems. It must realise, then, that its promises of change have little time in which to come true. *