LAHORE: Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf has declared that no more oil-based thermal plants will be installed in the country. President Asif Ali Zardari, on the other hand, keeps praising Benazir Bhutto’s energy policy of inducting oil-based independent power producers (IPP). He also says that if her policy had not been reversed by the governments that followed, there would have been no power outages in the country today.
It is a pity that no one in the opposition is taking notice of the contradiction in these self-serving statements made by the prime minister and the president. There is no shortage of IPPs in the country; the real shortage is of the oil that is required by them in order to operate and this can only be acquired only if the nation pays through its nose. When Ms Bhutto put all her eggs in the IPP basket, did she think that oil prices would remain static for all times to come? Should she also not have gone for long-term hydropower projects at the same time? If she had, there would have been no prolonged power cuts today.
Was it because the only dam that could have been built at that time to solve the country’s energy problems was in Punjab? And yet, the PPP continues to call itself a party of the federation.
Khurshid Anwer
Published in The Express Tribune, October 6th, 2012.
