Daily Times

Surely the federal cabinet knew that the plan to split Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) into new companies in a bid to revive its fortunes has been tried, and found wanting, before. And the fact that employees and opposition parties revolted was just one of the core reasons for the plan’s failure. Nawaz Sharif gave a similar green light as prime minister in 2015, but then found that not only was it impossible to sell the plan to trade unions, employees and the opposition in the assembly, but it would also require the government to take the losses on its own books, which would have raised red flags all the way from Islamabad to the IMF and some others among our many donors.

A better way to check losses and turn the airline around would have been to work on areas that really matter like trimming the employee-to-aircraft ratio, undertaking image, brand and capacity building exercises, and eliminating corruption from the organisation. The management clearly needs a very urgent overhaul. PIA still has a number of its white body aircraft grounded in Lahore and Karachi and it hasn’t done much about it, or given issues like the embarrassment caused by the recent seizure of one of its planes in Kuala Lumpur, and being banned from European airspace, the attention they deserve. The controversial decision to cut some of the dead wood, as 2,000 people were laid off under the Voluntary Separation Scheme (VSS), should have been followed by hiring aviation professionals and improving things on the ground like service delivery, passenger safety, etc. Unless things that really matter for airlines begin to change, and are seen to be changing, the airline will not begin to cut losses and never return to profitability. Yet not only did authorities very badly mishandle VSS, holding up payments forever in blatant disregard of the government’s own promises, but they didn’t follow it up with any management changes either.

At such a time, instead of going back to the drawing board and taking stock of the situation, the government seems to have reached the lowest hanging fruit that it could lay its eyes on. The only thing is that in this case this particular fruit turned rotten a long time ago. It is unfortunate that such randomness has typified successive governments’ approach to the problem of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), which continue to hemorrhage hundreds of billions of rupees every year. First this government played around with the idea of a new Pakistan for all these years, now it’s making headlines with its new PIA idea; which, as stated earlier, is not even a novelty, it’s an idea already ruled out by the government of Pakistan itself. Hopefully the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC), which has been tasked with fine-tuning this idea, will remind the cabinet of its folly in going down this road. *