Khalid Masood Khan
There is a particular kind of institutional rot that does not announce itself loudly. It does not arrive through dramatic confrontations or open defiance. It works quietly, methodically, through delay, procedural obstruction, and the slow suffocation of decisions that threaten comfortable arrangements. Pakistan’s bureaucracy has mastered this art over decades, and the latest theatre of this performance is the country’s battered power sector.
A decision was taken last month by the National Task Force on Energy, under Power Minister Awais Leghari, to merge several obsolete state-owned generation companies — known as GENCOs — into a single, leaner entity. The logic was not complicated. Four GENCOs, namely the Jamshoro unit of 660 megawatts, the Guddu plant of 747 megawatts, the Nandipur facility of 525 megawatts, and Lakhra Power, along with their parent body the Genco Holding Company Limited, were to be absorbed into the National Power Parks Management Company. The old oil-based plants these entities once operated had already been shut down or put up for auction. Hundreds of their employees had been temporarily reassigned to distribution companies pending a final resolution. In every meaningful operational sense, these GENCOs had already ceased to exist. What remained were administrative shells: letterheads, board seats, and the privileges that came attached to them.
The task force directed the Power Division and the GHCL to issue a formal notification initiating the merger and winding-up process. That notification has not come. Weeks have passed. The bureaucratic machinery has not moved. What has moved instead is a counter-proposal: consolidate the GENCOs under the GHCL itself rather than dissolving the structure altogether. This alternative, floated by the very officials whose positions depend on keeping these companies alive, would not only preserve the existing corporate architecture but actually expand it, creating an estimated fifty-five to sixty additional staff positions at the GENCOs and the GHCL headquarters.
To call this proposal counterproductive would be an understatement. These are organisations without operations, companies without purpose. Their plants have been closed or are being disposed of after years of low efficiency, mounting costs, and chronically poor performance. The facilities they were created to manage no longer function. Maintaining redundant corporate structures around non-functional entities is not administration: it is waste dressed up as governance.
Yet the incentives to preserve the status quo are real and immediate. The GHCL’s chief executive and board reportedly continue operating at full capacity, holding multiple meetings each week. Every board sitting generates compensation of at least one hundred thousand rupees per member, on top of travel expenses and accommodation costs. Official vehicles, fuel allocations, and support staff remain in place. For those occupying these positions, every day the merger is delayed is a day the benefits continue to flow. The reluctance to act swiftly is not difficult to understand when viewed through this lens. What is being protected is not institutional effectiveness. It is institutional comfort.
This pattern is not new, and it is not unique to the power sector. As observers at Republic Policy have long documented, Pakistan’s bureaucratic structure has historically operated as a self-perpetuating system, one that prioritises the preservation of its own hierarchies and perquisites over the reform imperatives of a struggling state. The constitutional and administrative architecture of the country provides bureaucrats with extraordinary capacity to delay, dilute, and ultimately defeat decisions that are not in their personal interest. The power sector is simply the most recent and most visible example of this tendency in action.
What makes this particular episode especially damaging is the context in which it is occurring. The power sector is not experiencing a minor inconvenience. It is in a state of structural crisis. Circular debt has ballooned to figures that strain the language of fiscal description. Capacity payments to idle plants drain billions from the public treasury each year. Consumers pay among the highest electricity tariffs in the region while receiving among the worst service. The entire edifice of energy governance has become a mechanism for transferring public money into the hands of those who benefit from inefficiency rather than those who are harmed by it. Against this backdrop, the resistance to merging a handful of hollow corporate entities is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a symptom of the deeper dysfunction that makes reform across the sector so difficult to achieve.
There is also a credibility dimension to this failure that deserves attention. The National Task Force on Energy was constituted to send a signal, a signal that the government was serious about cutting institutional deadwood, reducing administrative overhead, and redirecting resources toward productive use. When its directives go unimplemented, that signal is reversed. What gets communicated instead is that the machinery of the state is capable of absorbing reform rhetoric without absorbing reform itself. Decision-makers can announce, task forces can recommend, ministers can direct, but if the apparatus below does not execute, the entire exercise becomes performative.
The solution is not merely administrative. It requires a willingness to confront resistance directly, to hold accountable those who obstruct implementation, and to strip away the institutional protections that make non-compliance costless for those who engage in it. Bureaucrats who obstruct a formally sanctioned decision of a national task force should face consequences. The benefits attached to board positions in defunct entities should be suspended pending resolution. The Power Division officials responsible for issuing the merger notification should be required to explain, on record, why it has not been issued.
Pakistan cannot afford reform that stops at the announcement stage. The power sector alone costs the national exchequer trillions each year through inefficiency, mismanagement, and the deliberate preservation of structures that serve no purpose beyond sustaining privilege. Every day these hollow GENCOs continue to exist as independent entities is another day public money is consumed without public benefit.
The merger decision was sensible, straightforward, and overdue. What stands between that decision and its implementation is not complexity. It is the organised self-interest of a bureaucratic class that has learned, over decades, that the state will not press the matter. That assumption must be proven wrong.
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