It’s déjà-vu time. Again.

As the generator hammers away in the background and the temperature rises to 113°F (45 degress Celsius), and my cat lies under the tree panting, we celebrate the return of The Big Dark. At the flick of a switch there we have it, Dark in an instant. There are vast supplies of Dark stockpiled against a rising demand in coming months, and it is believed that Pakistan may import extra Dark courtesy of the failure to pay bills owed to those unwise enough to extend lines of credit to our oil-and-gas purchasing entities. Big Dark is Big Business, and none know that better than the scrofulous boondogglers that beaver away at maintaining the highly profitable cycle of circular debt.

You may recall that the government pelted the circular debt with upteen billions of rupees a few months back and declared it ‘retired’. Circular debt said, ‘Well thanks very much, we’ll have some more of that when you are ready.’ The government will doubtless oblige.

None of this is new, of course. The last government was no less assiduous in its determined mismanagement of anything and everything in the power sector, and the new-ish government has picked up the baton and is racing for the finish line — at which point, ‘The Big Plug’ gets pulled and we all sit around in a hot, sticky Big Dark wondering about an imminent apocalypse.

Anybody who can do a Google search will quickly discover that Pakistan has installed generating capacity in excess of its current consumption. What the search will not reveal is the trail of corruption and incompetence that has reduced the nation to this parlous state. The fact that millions of us, every day, have to endure the discomfort of power outages is not the result of some dark plot hatched by the CIA working hand in glove with the Mossad and RAW. There is no conspiracy behind The Big Dark. None. At least no foreign conspiracy — but there are plenty of domestic ones. As self-inflicted wounds go, this is right up there with sitting in a hot bath and slitting your wrists.

The other gaping hole in the national arterial system comes in the form of nearly 900,000 internally displaced people, which the government itself has driven from their homes and livelihoods. These people did not up sticks and shift of their own volition. They were forced to leave their homes with whatever they could carry while their government reduced to rubble that which they could not. Possibly as part of a job creation scheme in a far future wherein the IDPs will return and be offered work, turning piles of broken bricks into houses. Again.

Then there is the Very Big Extremely Quiet (VBEQ). The VBEQ lies around the place here in south Punjab in vast and mostly silent chunks. It is a collection of elephants in the national lounge. They stand hushed, trunks swinging, eyes watchful and there is not a sound. And what is this VBEQ made of exactly? Dark matter? Quarks? Higgs bosons? Nope, it is made up of a very tight-lipped group of gentlemen who sit behind anonymous walls and — allegedly — provide a range of services for those other gentlemen that the government is currently fighting in North Waziristan, which produced the miserable exodus of IDPs. There is almost an elegant symmetry about it.

The VBEQ really ought to be the Extremely-Noisy-Rooting-Out-of-Troublesome-Elements (ENROTE), but that might just have political consequences that certain of our masters may find conflicting with their own ideological position and inclinations. So best to leave the VBEQ where it is and not disturb all those mute pachyderms. Keep all that messy fighting and those miserable IDPs safely at arm’s length up there in a very large cupboard.

Which brings us full circle and back to where we started long before anybody thought of having an electoral recount. The Big Dark, the IDPs and the VBEQ taken together represent a confection of monstrous incompetence, of missed or wasted opportunities, of a failure of the national moral compass and a lack of vision bordering on institutional blindness. And is anybody going to do anything about all this? Good heavens NO. Tootle-pip

Published in The Express Tribune, July 17^th, 2014.

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