Nothing learnt

Capital suggestion
Red alert. The worst thing that can happen to a government is systemic failure. Red alert. The worst thing that can happen to a government is exponential decay (whereby a government learns nothing – or even worse – from experience). What did we learn from the Army Public School tragedy? Answer: Four things – military courts, arm the teachers, higher walls and private security guards for schools.
What did we learn from the petrol crisis? Answer: The crisis was caused by ‘beggars’. And what did we learn from the country-wide electricity blackout? Answer: That a minor terrorist undertaking that blows a 250 kVA transmission line in terror-prone Balochistan will push 80 percent of Pakistan back to the Bronze Age.
There are three types of failures. Random failures are due to physical causes. Wear-out failures are when ‘items of limited life have worn out’. Systemic failures are ‘failures due to flaws in system’. And even more importantly ‘systems subjected to the same conditions fail consistently’.
Are military courts the solution? For the record, 30,190 terrorists have been killed since 2003. Yes, the military courts will hang a few dozen more. Then what? Next: arming female dupatta-clad teachers? Einstein said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity”.
When one shows up at a petrol station and is successful in getting petrol there is an entire system of interconnected parts behind it. In our case, the ‘system’ that delivers petrol primarily comprises the Ministry of Petroleum, Pakistan State Oil, oil marketing companies, the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority, logistics, petrol pumps and the banking system (that opens up Letters of Credit to import oil). Any beggars in the system?
Red alert. The system that delivers petrol is going through ‘systemic failure’ – a failure due to flaws in the system of interconnected and interdependent parts. Two things about systemic failures – they are predictable (because flaws in any system are predictable) and systemic failures arise from human error.
To be certain, the petrol crisis was neither a random failure nor a wear-out failure. In effect, the petrol crisis was predictable and the crisis arose from human error.
Our ‘system’ that delivers electricity primarily comprises the Ministry of Water and Power, the independent power producers (IPPs), the National Electric Power Regulatory Agency, the Water and Power Development Authority, DISCOS and the National Transmission and Dispatch Company.
The official story of January 25 begins with a small-scale terrorist incidence in Naseerabad that tripped Guddu cascading to Jamshoro to Bin Qasim and then on to the rest of Pakistan.
In power transmission, if and when “one of the elements fails it shifts its load to nearby elements in the system. Those nearby elements are then pushed beyond their capacity so they become overloaded and shift their load onto other elements”. In essence, “failure of one part of a system of interconnected parts triggering successive failures”.
But, our ‘system’ has ‘real-time monitoring’ and what that means is that the failing part of the system should have been cordoned off (to save the rest of the system). Once again, the country-wide blackout was predictable (and thus preventable) and surely arose from human error.
Red alert. If we haven’t learnt anything then ‘systems subjected to the same conditions fail consistently’.
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad. Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com
Twitter: @saleemfarrukh