News:
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, on Thursday, 13th November 2014, offered to align his country’s policy framework with international practices in the hope that the London Roundtable Conference on Energy would help Pakistan create an enabling environment for investment. He said the government would also like to know the incentives and policy framework that can spur private investment in the oil and gas sectors of Pakistan. The premier invited foreign businessmen to invest in the country’s lucrative energy sector. He said, “It [the sector] holds great promise for an attractive rate of return on all investments”.
Comment:
Before becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan for the third time, Nawaz Sharif asserted that his government will end the worst ever energy crisis in the history of Pakistan very soon. However, after a lapse of almost eighteen months in government, the miseries of the people are far from ending. During the tenure of the last PPP government, people were told that the root cause of this severe energy crisis is the limited capacity of generating electricity. They said that this is because the eight yearlong Musharraf government did not add a single megawatt of electricity to the national grid. They prescribed rental powers projects as an immediate remedy to end this crisis. A billion Rupees were invested in rental power projects, but the situation became even worse than the Musharraf era.
In the last days of the PPP government, the root cause of the energy crisis was diagnosed circular as debt. When Nawaz Sharif took office on May 2013, PMLN government immediately released 480 billion Rupees to write off circular debt. For a short period of time, people felt a bit of relief, but again the energy crisis started haunting the people and wrecking the economy of Pakistan. Circular debt again reached a staggering amount of 503 billion, which the government cleared in July 2014. And today the circular debt has reached 211 billion rupees in just a few months. All of these huge amounts are filling the pockets of a few capitalist private owners of the property that Islam has stipulated as public property. This violation of Islam occurs at great cost to the people and economy of Pakistan.
Since mid-nineties successive Pakistani governments opened power sector to private sector including foreign investors as well and made such agreements which ensures highest returns on their investment whether electricity is purchased from them or not through sovereign guarantees provided from government of Pakistan. And this has resulted in sever electricity crisis in Pakistan. At the moment Pakistan has installed capacity of 20000 megawatt but generating around 13000 megawatt. Private producers produce less as they find producing less result in higher profits but it cripples Pakistan economy.
Instead of taking lesson from this history, the current Raheel-Nawaz regime is fully committed to privatize Pakistan’s oil and gas sector, which is at the moment earning good profits. The biggest oil and gas company, OGDCL, has just announced a net profit for the financial year 2013-14, at a huge 124 billion Rupees.
The energy sector is the backbone of the modern economy. If it crumbles, the whole economy shatters. The Prime Minister’s recent visits of China, Germany and Britain are not for the people of Pakistan, rather they are for the benefit of foreign investors, so that they come to own these public properties and deprive the Ummah from these immense natural resources, drowning her in further poverty.
The Raheel-Nawaz regime aggressively works to sell off Pakistan’s energy sector to foreign investors, which will further enslave Pakistan to the US and other colonialist nations. Pakistan cannot become an economic giant under democracy or dictatorship, which both implement the capitalist system and follow the dictation of colonialist institutions, like the IMF. Pakistan’s true potential can only be materialized under the Khilafah. The Khilafah will implement the economic system of Islam and manage the energy sector as a guardian of public property, which will ensure the productive utilization of the immense energy sector and generate substantial revenues for looking after the affairs of the people.
وَلَوْ أَنَّهُمْ أَقَامُواْ ٱلتَّوْرَاةَ وَٱلإِنْجِيلَ وَمَآ أُنزِلَ إِلَيهِمْ مِّن رَّبِّهِمْ لأَكَلُواْ مِن فَوْقِهِمْ وَمِن تَحْتِ أَرْجُلِهِم
“If only they had implemented the Torah and the Injil and what was sent down to them from their Lord, they would have been fed from above their heads and beneath their feet. Among them there is a moderate group but what most of them do is evil.”
(Al-Maida: 66)
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir by
Shahzad Shaikh
Deputy to the Spokesman of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Wilayah Pakistan