Unpaid bills: Electricity to Pakistan President’s house disconnected

• Posted on April 30, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The Pakistan president’s home is one of 18 government buildings to have electricity cut off because of unpaid energy bills.

Gas company officials said they shut off supplies on Sunday evening after sending a final demand to Nawaz Sharif’s office for arrears of more than £28,000.

Pakistan’s power ministry said today it would cut off supplies to major offices, including the prime minister’s in a crackdown on customers not paying their electricity bills.

Pakistan’s economy is crippled by persistent blackouts lasting up to 12 hours a day partly because influential families, politicians and bureaucrats do not pay for their use while the poor often cannot afford rising utility bills.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif promised to fix the power cuts as one of his priorities.

But today Pakistan’s minister of state for water and power said the campaign to eradicate non-payment would now target his own office.

‘Electricity to all state institutions and individual consumers who haven’t cleared their dues will be disconnected,’ Abid Sher Ali said in televised remarks.

‘There will be no discrimination.’

The minister, who is from the ruling party, said he had ordered the Islamabad Electricity Supply Company to disconnect power to the President House, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, the parliament building, the official residence of the chief justice and many other offices.

?There was no immediate comment from those affected.

A spokesman for Sui Northern Gas Pipeline Limited said the prime minister’s residence and a string of other government buildings were cut off over bills totalling almost £100,000.

Pakistan’s state power companies are notoriously inefficient but critics have long questioned just how
far Sharif will be prepared to go to overhaul an important sector dominated by decades-long alliances, industry loyalties and lobby groups.

Targeting government offices as part of the campaign would send a powerful message to ordinary people in Pakistan that Sharif is serious about reform and that no one would be spared in his campaign against non-payment of bills.

 -dailymail