Pakistan in Media

Were the government ever to devise a heraldic coat of arms for itself it would comprise a green-and-white shield surmounted by a fat cat sitting astride a starving peasant. A report in this newspaper details the government working with big business to inflate the price of sugar and then killing off an attempt to investigate its doing so. There is to be no judicial or criminal probe into the activities of the sugar lobby that now waddles towards Eid secure in the knowledge that it has the government firmly in its pocket. A key cabinet committee has been subverted and the government's finance minister has had his arm twisted and told to 'take it easy' in respect of exposing those at the heart of the scam.

As if the sugar scandal were not enough we have another layer of the Great Power Cock-up exposed. The federal cabinet has overturned a decision by the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) to limit power purchases from rental power projects to 1,500 MW by upping it by 75 per cent to 2,250 MW from the rental power providers. Shaukat Tarin has again been made to look a fool as he is on recent public record as saying that he was opposed to the rental power projects and that minimal use should be made of them because of the cripplingly high cost of power produced by them – and now we are committed to purchasing their expensive volts at a time when the global oil price has peaked at a 10-month high of $75 per barrel. Just in time to feed through to our energy sector and further inflate the cost of the power we only intermittently receive. Were any of this blatant manipulation of the prices of core products and services to have been exposed in a country where ethical governance and the rule of law actually mattered, there would have been crowds outside parliament calling for an election and the prosecution of those responsible. But they were exposed here in the Land of the Pure. So nothing happens. Democracy? No thanks, it gets in the way of business.
sourcs