Incompetence in the power sector

There is no worse indictment of the inefficiency of the state-run segment of the power sector when the government is unable to improve the nation’s energy infrastructure despite having the money to do so. In recent days, it has emerged that the government has been unable to effectively utilise more than $2.5 billion in financing from the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Some projects are falling behind by as much as four years. Others face the kind of comical delays that would be funny were they not quite so disastrous in their consequences. This example brings forward a highly distressing point: even when the government is keen on fixing a problem, even when it has the money available to do so, it finds itself struggling to get the job done. The reasons for this, in our view, are twofold.

The first is structural: the institutions of government have a severe misalignment of incentives that effectively mean that nobody faces any disciplinary repercussions for this lack of professionalism. The second is even more worrying than the first: even if there was a desire to do the right thing on the part of civil servants, most of them are too incompetent to get the job done.



Both problems, however, have a single origin. The elite of Pakistan have for too long sought to create a government that served only their needs and nobody else’s. For seven decades now, we have consistently built and maintained a system of government where the bureaucracy is not used to being answerable to the people, even under a democratic government. And seven decades of underinvestment in education have meant that the vast majority of people who do make it into the highest echelons of government are not — in any objective sense — qualified to do the job of running a country. How else does one explain the fact that the single policy item that is easily number one on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s agenda from the day he took office — fixing the power sector — is also one where no amount of money or ministerial determination appears to be able to get matters resolved. The problem is deeper than just a project delayed. It is in the very edifice of our political economy. Until we address that, all else will be just temporary bandages.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2015.

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