Sherry lashes out at govt over power outages

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPPP) Vice President Sherry Rehman Monday said federal government secretary’s latest statement on electricity was a bizarre denial of unprecedented loadshedding across the country.
“Its failure to deliver on its promised manifesto of resolving the energy crisis and then pretend the problem doesn’t exist is not just callous, but to deny the existence of crippling loadshedding is both cruel and dangerous,” Senator Sherry Rehman said.
Her remarks came in the wake of an official statement issued by the Ministry of Water and Power through which its secretary, Younas Dagha, said that there was no domestic loadshedding throughout the country. “The Ministry of Water and Power’s statement unashamedly mocks at the misery of consumers and industries alike, with an unprecedented increase in the frequency of power outages and loadshedding throughout the country,” she said.
“Have they not seen the number of people dying of heat stroke and the untold miseries the common man is burdened with in this hottest month of the year?” she said, questioning the federal government on its failure to deliver on its promised manifesto.
The PPP vice president said while the government continued to make populist claims of introducing new power projects, it had remained silent on the number of previous projects that had either been delayed or abandoned for various reasons. “At the same time, growth in electricity generation and distribution has receded,” she added.
She said that there was little that the federal government, which ran on a manifesto of resolving the energy crisis in a period of 2 years after coming into power, could claim in its achievements on the energy front,” observed Rehman. “The government has paid scant attention to issues other than circular debt, including chronic inefficiency and energy theft,” she said, adding that it was clear that the supply chain of the energy sector was not helping growth, a stated objective of the government for the forthcoming fiscal year.
The senator said that with a tight deficit ceiling under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility, the government was likely to resort to indirect taxation and further strain domestic consumers without being able to plug the energy deficit.
Sherry Rehman said that the government’s claims stood in sharp contrast with projections that showed that the energy deficit would continue to expand against planned generation capability at least until 2017 and was likely to continue for another three years.
She said the government’s plan to diversify the energy mix through LNG imports from Qatar had also been severely compromised by the lack of transparency, proper planning and coordination. “There is reason to suggest that the import process may have been expedited by the government to make up for the nation-wide petroleum crisis that erupted in January this year,” she added.
Sherry Rehman warned that the people of Pakistan owed a better explanation than this, especially in the month of Ramazan, where unprecedented heat was also adding to untold miseries all across the country.