Opposition slams power outages despite 'expensive electricity'

ISLAMABAD:

Opposition parties on Thursday vehemently slammed ongoing electricity and gas loadshedding across the country, denouncing it as unjust and a reflection of governance failures, despite high power tariffs and claimed surplus generation capacity.

Leaders of the JUI-F and JI questioned the rationale behind the outages, arguing that the burden of policy decisions was being shifted onto the public.

JUI-F spokesperson Aslam Ghauri said the decision to carry out loadshedding amounted to injustice against the public. "On what basis is loadshedding being carried out despite the most expensive electricity?" he questioned and added, "Such injustice is not taking place even in war-affected countries".

He further alleged that the rulers were using the fragile situation in the region to fulfil the demands of the IMF.

Separately, Hafiz Naeemur Rehman said the entire country was severely affected by electricity and gas loadshedding.

He noted that Pakistan's power generation capacity stands at 49,000 megawatts, while current consumption is less than half, yet electricity is still not available to the public. He said that if there were difficulties in generating electricity from oil and gas, the required power can easily be obtained from alternative sources.

He questioned whether the increase in generation capacity was done merely to benefit IPPs, which, he said, have already received thousands of billions of rupees in the form of capacity charges without producing electricity.