Trying to lure energy companies from London to invest in Pakistan, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif claimed that the government’s decision to pay off the Rs450 billion circular debt may have saved the country from plunging into darkness. As sales pitches go, bragging about eventually paying bills that were long overdue is hardly going to inspire confidence in jittery outsiders. Shahbaz also neglected to mention that the circular debt was paid off by simply printing new money and that it will soon begin accumulating again. The government simply is not liquid enough to prevent its re-emergence. The World Bank is even more pessimistic about the state of our energy sector, saying in a recent report that loadshedding is costing the economy about Rs450 billion a year and that more than 12 percent of electricity bills remain uncollected. We are also so dependent on imported oil that our foreign currency reserves are perilously low. The only solution the government has offered so far is to continue raising the price of electricity. Now that the Iranian gas pipeline seems to be dead and buried, with the government unwilling to withstand US pressure and build its portion of the pipeline, we can also expect corresponding increases in the price of gas. In short, the energy sector in Pakistan is a disaster no matter how hard Shahbaz Sharif may try to convince foreigners otherwise.

In fact, the Punjab chief minister should be the last one to sing the praises of our dying energy sector. The gas shortage is so bad that the province has decided to shut all CNG stations over the winter so that industrial and domestic users will not have to endure too much gas loadshedding. The shortage has come just a few short years after Pervez Musharraf encouraged mass consumption of gas and launched a massive campaign to convince people to shift their cars to CNG. This is the problem with how the energy sector has been managed in Pakistan. Short-sighted decisions that provide only temporary relief are trumpeted as game changers even as the difficult tasks of improving transmission losses and strengthening our crumbling infrastructure are postponed because their effects will be felt too far down the line for the government to get immediate political mileage out of them. Shahbaz Sharif may just be playing his role as a salesman in London to try and lure potential investors but all investors worth their salt will know that the chief minister is taking them for a ride.



The Right to Information (RTI) bill, originally introduced as an ordinance by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, has finally been passed by the provisional assembly but amendments added to the bill have made it considerably weaker. The RTI bill now imposes a fine of Rs50,000 or a two-year prison sentence for those who ‘use the information obtained for mala fide purposes’. The bill itself does not define what falls under the ambit of mala fide purposes so this clause could end up scaring away people from seeking information and be used to persecute those who uncover official wrongdoing. For some reason, the Peshawar High Court has been exempted from public bodies that must comply with the terms of the bill. A wide swath of information that should routinely be made available to the public has also been exempted from the bill, including topics related to ‘international relations and security’, ‘disclosure harmful to law enforcement’, ‘public economic affairs’, ‘public money’, ‘privacy’, ‘legal privilege’ and ‘commercial and confidential information”. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly, by adding these exceptions to the bill, could deny the release of almost any information it would prefer to keep secret. Should they be abused, these clauses have the ability to render the rest of the bill null and void.

Despite these regrettable changes, the RTI bill could be used as a model for the other provinces and the centre. The draft Freedom of Information Bill presented by the PML-N is a travesty that does the very opposite of what such a bill should do. It gives individual departments the right to decide if they want to release documents and the only oversight is in the form of an ombudsman who can advise them but has no real authority. Each request for information also requires the payment of a burdensome fee which will surely discourage the public from exercising their right to know what their elected representatives and public servants are up to. This is where the RTI bill should inform the Freedom of Information bill currently being considered in the Senate. The RTI bill mandates that officers be appointed who can be approached for all requests for information and who will be expected to avoid delays and obfuscation. Even more importantly the RTI bill includes protection for whistleblowers so that no one will lose his or her job for revealing information that could be damaging to those in power. Of course, the success of the RTI can only be judged by its implementation but the federal government should pay heed to some of the language in that bill.