Consider some of the threats being made by the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf in connection with its call for ‘civil disobedience’. They say, for instance, that the public will not be paying any electricity or gas bills, and if the centre should respond by cutting off electricity supplies to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, they will cut off power supply from Tarbela Dam.

I wonder if Mr Mushtaq Ghani, the information minister of the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who made this threat, has ever been to Tarbela. The dam has a large powerhouse with a generation capacity of 3500MW. Downstream from the powerhouse is the Ghazi Barotha hydropower project, with an additional capacity of 1300MW.

Both power stations are run by Wapda, a federal entity. The electricity produced from these stations is evacuated to a number of grid stations from Peshawar to Burhan on the left bank of the Indus. The grid stations and their transmission network is handled by the National Transmission & Despatch Company which sells it on to the eight distribution companies of the country.

At no point does the electricity travel through any office controlled by the PTI or its government. So how exactly do they intend to deliver on this threat to cut off electricity supplies from Tarbela? Both Wapda and NTDC are federal entities and report to the Ministry of Water and Power and are not likely to take instructions from the PTI or its government in KP.

The threats being issued by the PTI, and the demands being made, show a fundamental disconnect with reality

The only way they could cut off this electricity would be to physically force their way into the Tarbela powerhouse and shut it off themselves, or to sabotage the transmission infrastructure, threats that nobody is likely to take seriously.

Take another example. The party leadership is saying that their government in KP will not collect taxes in response to their party’s call for civil disobedience. A brief glance at the KP provincial budget is enough to tell you that this is simply not workable.

The province has budgeted Rs404 billion expenditures for the ongoing fiscal year. The total budgeted revenue is also Rs404bn, of which revenues from taxes controlled by the provincial government are barely Rs25bn. The largest chunk of the revenues to pay for this expenditure comes from what is called the Federal Divisible Pool, which is taxes collected by the centre and then transferred to the provinces according to a formula in the National Finance Commission Award.

So if the KP government does not want to collect taxes any longer, who will be hit the hardest? The provincial government itself, and then it will have to face up to some basic questions. Without the revenue, will it also cut expenditures accordingly? If so, are they prepared to stop payment of salaries to government personnel, including teachers and police and staff at the secretariat? Or will they cut their development budget, which means stopping work on pet projects like some micro-hydel schemes, and then paying for massive cost overruns whenever work resumes?

They could continue running the government and meeting its bills by running into overdraft with the State Bank, but they should know that the bank has in the past felt free to bounce provincial government cheques when it felt that the provincial authorities were being irresponsible in managing their finances.

Then they threaten to stop collecting electricity and gas bills. First of all, the power to collect these bills belongs to the Peshawar Electric Supply Company, which is technically under the federal government and the order to stop collecting bills will have to come from there. If customers stop paying their bills we’ll know the PTI’s call is being answered in large numbers, but if they don’t stop we’ll know they are being ignored in their own constituency.

But more importantly, what will be the effects of stopping bill collection in KP? The distribution company buys just under 7,000 units of electricity from the national grid at an average price of Rs10.45 per unit, and sells it to a customer base of just under three million all told. Because of a difference in the determined and notified price, there is a subsidy element of almost Rs35bn in its finances where total sales revenue is projected at Rs164bn.

Can someone from the PTI please explain how they propose Pesco continue making its power purchase payments if they will not be collecting bills? Will the company borrow commercially? Or will it only come back and bill the consumers later, once this whole mess has blown over? Keep in mind that the distribution company had only just emerged from the damaging effects of a Peshawar High Court judgement that had disallowed it from collecting fuel price adjustment charges, a judgement that was overturned by the Supreme Court just this past April.

The damage done to the company’s finances is substantial, and to add to their problems, the writ petition had been filed by the KP government itself, back in 2011. Now, just as they had that business sorted out, along comes the call to stop paying bills.

The threats being issued, and the demands being made show a fundamental disconnect with reality. There is no way the party or its provincial government can deliver on these threats, or live with their consequences. It is worrying that senior political figures, holding responsibility for the running of a provincial government machinery, would say these sorts of things, which amount to cutting off your own nose to spite your enemy.

Even more worrying is the thought that these threats are not even serious. This kind of politics runs completely contrary to the image of itself that the PTI has sought to portray, as a party committed to good governance, to professionalism in its approach, to taking economic matters seriously. Apparently all that was just talk.

For a party that prided itself on being the first to produce a vision document for economic revival as part of its campaign, and for producing a white paper on the government’s economic performance, to show this cavalier attitude towards critical economic issues such as power sector recoveries and tax compliance is a very sad revelation of its true colours.

The writer is a member of staff.

khurram.husain@gmail.com

Twitter: @khurramhusain

Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2014