The recently sacked energy minister must have found it hard to suppress his smile last Thursday. Obviously he was not enjoying some sort of vicarious pleasure while the whole country suffered from power failure. Nevertheless the energy blackout proved, as nothing could have proven more forcefully, that technical things like power supply cannot be controlled by administrative fiat or deployment of the armed forced. The government of Sheikh Hasina suffered a humiliating day of public scorn not because of her minister being bad or inefficient, which we think he was, but because of the whole system of governance which does not plan, prepare and take quick actions to solve problems at hand.

Thursday's power failure occurred at 10 am in the morning. Till late night nobody could tell the nation what probably had happened. Responses to all questions were shelved on an inquiry committee's work to come out, God only knows when. We recall a similar nationwide blow out last year whose inquiry report is yet to come before the public. Simply put. the nation's power situation is in a precarious state suffering from critical shortage of supply on the one hand and dismal state of maintenance, management, planning and supervision on the other. Our educated guess of the blow out is that when the PM took charge and asked for magical solutions to systemic flaws, eager officials wanted to show an instant improvement leading to overloading the system and its consequent blow out.

Our first suggestion is that, do not waste valuable time and energy on the sabotage theory. If there has been any sabotage it occurred over the last two years when vital decisions were shelved, postponed or put through numerous bureaucratic maze leading to loss of valuable time.

Our second suggestion is that the government should immediately remove the smokes that seem to cloud the whole energy scene and bring about more clarity, transparency and accountability into the whole process. Let the nation know the extent of our problem, the options that we have, the cost and the time required for each of the options and then let us decide on a course of action through widespread debate. All this may appear to require more time than we have. But look at how we have stumbled because our ad hoc and fragmented approach.