PPP and PML-N cut from the same cloth

Why should a province go the extra mile to generate electricity when it cannot be sure it will be able to use it?

After skipping many auspicious moments in the assembly, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif chose to speak yesterday as legislators were about to take up the finance bill.

He could have spoken on Monday, before the finance minister wound up the budget debate, but the treasury had been waiting for opposition assurances that members would not disrupt the chief minister’s speech. The law minister got such a promise yesterday from the leader of the opposition.

Those committee room assurances of the PPP-led opposition came to nothing when the PML-Q ladies’ brigade booed the leader of the house. The chief minister was visibly agitated, evidence perhaps that he is not someone who faces disagreement and opposition on most days. Unlike the seasoned parliamentarians who don’t let some shouting and hooliganism keep them from saying what they want to, the leader of the house had demanded pin-drop silence.

He spoke at length about why the Punjab government had not started an energy project worth a watt to ease the excruciating load shedding that the province’s population of 90 million is subjected to. He forwarded two defences. One, that the passage of the 18th Amendment did not give the provinces the right to install their own projects (though he admitted in the same breath that the Council of Common Interests had given the provinces this right administratively, if not constitutionally.) Two, even if the Punjab did build a power plant, the energy would go to the national grid, at which point there was no guarantee that this energy would be supplied to houses and factories in the Punjab.

While the chief minister’s first point was self-contradictory, the second made sense. Why should a province go the extra mile to generate power if it cannot be sure it will be able to use it?

The chief minister complained incessantly about the power supply to the Punjab, claiming that 650 MW that rightfully belonged to the province was being given to other provinces. He asked why Karachi and Islamabad went through 4-5 hours of load shedding while Punjab was without power for 16-18 hours a day.

The power crisis has not only made lives miserable, it has ruined the national economy. But the fact of the matter is, chest thumping and political sloganeering aside, no government, provincial or federal, has done anything to resolve or even begin to resolve this crisis. The blame game being witnessed in the assemblies and in the streets are just election year theatrics. That’s why in yesterday’s session of the Punjab Assembly, both the PML-N and the PPP looked cut from the same cloth.

Published In The Express Tribune, June 20^th, 2012.