Sea blindness and its cure

Imagine setting out to settle on a distant planet with a large crew and realising as you land there after a long, arduous journey that you have made no provision for water supply except what your vessel carries for immediate consumption. You may laugh but common sense is not a very common gift. For a country that has spent the past decade if not more dreaming about becoming the hub of regional connectivity courtesy projects like CPEC, being this ignorant of its maritime resources is unforgivable. There is a term for this state of affairs. It is called sea blindness.

Not convinced? Just recall all references to the ocean in our literature, pop culture, folk tales and news cycles, and tell me what you remember. Our collective imagination does not go beyond the beaches of Karachi, that too because going to those beaches has been a thing throughout our lives. In our history books too, what we have preserved is only the record of foreign invasions from sea by Muhammad bin Qasim and the British and not our own adventures on the sea. Many excuses can be made for this landlocked mindset. The vast territory of Pakistan is not directly exposed to the ocean. Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan all are landlocked provinces. Only parts of Balochistan and Sindh have direct access to the sea. But then Balochistan covers half of Pakistan’s landmass and is sparsely populated. So you need to travel a lot if you want to get to the sea. You can also blame it on how city and infrastructure development took place during colonial times. Our post-colonial state has done precious little, at least in the first five decades, beyond thinking inside the box that the British left behind. But how can this obscure the fact that the country has over one thousand kilometres long, unbroken, mostly pristine coastline? What is stopping our imagination from exploring life on the sea? Not even a small book like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea? There is no dearth of fishers in the country even though our per capita consumption of fish and seafood averages around 1-2 kilos per annum.

I see you are still not convinced that we are sea blind. Do you know how many private shipping companies and ocean liners we have? Zero, zip, zilch, nada. That’s right. The country’s affluent who keep sinking incredible sums of money in developing housing societies have not registered one shipping company in their name. Do you mean to tell me there is no profit to be made in the sector? Then what are you expecting from the Gwadar port? I don’t have the kind of money to start this business, or any for that matter, but if I had it, it would have been the first industry I would have invested in and shown you how much profit can be made there. The reason, you ask? Herd instinct? Sea blindness.

Solve this puzzle for me. There is one public sector-owned entity called Pakistan National Shipping Corporation (PNSC) and by the looks of it, it is among the most profitable state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but for the past two years, it was barred from procuring ships by the government. That is not all. Every year the import of petroleum products costs Pakistan an arm and a leg to meet our energy needs and it all arrives on oil tankers but Pakistan State Oil, another state-owned enterprise, pays hefty sums to foreign companies rather than utilising PNSC’s tanker services. And this is the incredible part. You have Pakistan Shipyard and Engineering Works (another profitable state-owned enterprise) which is perfectly capable of building ships for PNSC and the private sector. You have PNSC which can put those ships to good use ferrying cargo and oil. And then you have import-dependent SOEs like PSO. But somehow we haven’t been able to synergise them and exploit these sectors to the fullest. Wondering why you haven’t seen any reporting on this in the mainstream media? Answer: sea blindness.

Of course, there are other extenuating circumstances like bureaucratic red tape, political instability and silo mentality among SOEs and policy circles but throwing away large sums of borrowed money just because our public sector entities have not learned to work in tandem is mind-bogglingly unimaginative. Are we supposed to keep indebting our future generations just because our government departments cannot get along?

Sea blindness is the kind of handicap you don’t even know you have until you are exposed to the maritime potential of your country. A lifelong swimmer who is in love with all water bodies including lakes, rivers and oceans, a traveller, and a voracious reader I was surprised by my own ignorance when last week I joined the sixth Maritime Security Workshop at the Naval War College in Lahore. Thanks to the Pakistan Navy, we were not only exposed to the kind of facts our minds are trained to filter out but also taken on field trips from Karachi and deep sea aboard PNS Taimur to Gwadar, Ormara, and the country’s Creeks area. Of these, I have already been to the Naval facilities at Gwadar last year when I went there as a part of the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad’s delegation. Ormara I visited before this some 18 years ago. Other than a newly built Naval base there, it was a desolate place back then. But now it houses a brilliantly built and managed cadet college courtesy Pakistan Navy. Half of its students come from Balochistan. The visit to the Creeks area was a unique event on a par with my last visit to Siachen. The swampy, marshy Creeks area is not easy to reach and presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was in a briefing on the Sir Creek dispute there that it dawned on me how little is known and said in our mainstream media about the issue. See, sea blindness again.

In the workshop, we got the opportunity to interact with the senior leadership of the Pakistan Navy including its newly appointed chief, the Ministry of Maritime Affairs, port authorities and major influencers in the field. That is apart from a galaxy of leaders from all walks of life as participants.

I feel my sea blindness is partially cured. Pakistan Navy is doing what it can within its limited resources to overcome this national disability. But without a collective national effort all this talk about a blue economy, exploiting the country’s maritime resources, and serving as a regional trading hub will remain talk.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2023.

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