Our floating dreams arrived?

An Urdu daily carried a banner headline on 28th October, 2008 quoting the Minister for Power Raja Pervez Ashraf as saying that floating powerhouses aboard ships have docked in Karachi and the loadshedding is 'as good as over'. That is welcome news, even if rather sudden and unexpected. When were the tenders for these floating-powerhouses-on-ships called, who participated in tendering and who won, these beauties were purchased or hired, is all unknown. I imagine these powerhouses-on-ships must have cost billions to the exchequer at a time when it is already dangerously short of foreign exchange. But like everybody else, I am also ecstatic about loadshedding being a thing of the past now.

There is a general perception, or misperception, though, that a nation-wide hype is cleverly engineered by the interested mafias to create an acute shortage of one commodity or the other - of wheat, sugar, fertilizer, gasoline, power, even vegetables - which are then imported from abroad posthaste, setting aside all proper procurement procedures. These artificial crises afford opportunity of minting millions overnight to their planners and executers. After all it should take anything from 6 months to a year in the planning, negotiating, contracting and bringing in of such powerhouses-on-ships, which are supposed to arrive from God knows where after a long journey time to Karachi. Could someone more knowledgeable please make us wiser on this feat of exceptionally expeditious performance by the ministry concerned? -COL (Retd) RIAZ JAFRI, Rawalpindi, via e-mail, October 28.