Power crisis: Officials go missing in Senate hearing

SEPCO says can provide cheap power but govt not buying

ISLAMABAD:

In an exercise that makes a mockery of the ideas of parliamentary supremacy and legislative oversight of the executive, no cabinet members or government officials showed up at Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Water and Power Committee, which had been called to discuss the causes of the recent nationwide blackout.

Committee Chairman Zahid Khan of the Awami National Party (ANP) said that the attitude of ministers and officials is tantamount to ridiculing parliament. “Some ministers, who are relatives of the prime minister, have shown a total disregard for parliament, which will ultimately damage the prime minister,” he said. “Parliamentary committees are meant to keep a check on the performance of ministers.”



Yet even as all the members of the committee present deplored the government’s cavalier attitude towards the hearing, they neglected to notice the fact that only five out of the 14 members of the committee were present.

Besides the chairman, only Khalida Parveen and Nawabzada Saifullah Magsi of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Nisar Muhammad of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz, and Independent Senator Mohsin Leghari were present.

Senator Leghari said that the failure of government officials to answer a summons by the Senate committee was tantamount to contempt of Parliament. He argued that the committee members should resign from their positions on it as a mark of protest.

Senator Parveen, however, opposed that idea and said that it should be the cabinet members who failed to show up who should be required to resign. She then went off on a populist diatribe that included little evidence, but accused government officials of somehow profiting from the energy crisis.

Besides discussion of how they were being ignored by the government, however, the committee also heard testimony from the Shamsul Aziz, CEO of Southern Electric Power Company (SEPCO). Aziz claimed that, despite the fact that his company can produce and sell electricity at an average price of Rs8.50 per kilowatt-hour, the government has not been buying any power from his company and has stopped payments altogether. “The National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) has suddenly stopped advance payments and even capacity payments to run the power plant,” he said.

Upon hearing this, there was uproar in the committee, with chairman Zahid Khan suggesting that the treatment of Sepco was emblematic of the broader problem in the country’s energy policy.

However, even while they railed against the government for failing to adequately tackle the energy crisis, the committee also criticised the government for some actions that would address the root cause of the crisis: power theft.

Senator Zahid Khan, for instance, said that the government’s decision to file charges against electricity thieves in Tank district in his home province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa was somehow a deplorable act.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2015.