The headline of the country’s leading English newspaper Dawn has caught my attention today.
WORK BEGINS IN EARNEST ON NEW AIRLINE
Reading the details of the news I have learnt that the Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif received yesterday a detailed briefing on how to make the new airline competitive.
I can’t help wishing he had able enough advisers around him to brief him about how to put Pakistan’s national carrier PIA back on to the road to recovery and instead of ensuring its demise, try to bring about its turnaround reflective of its past glory.
My generation had once been proud of the stature of the PIA in the international aviation business. Even as late as in the Pervez Musharraf era when Ahmad Saeed was running PIA, the airline was regarded as recovering from the shocks that the successive ‘political’ regimes had given it by making it a recruiting company for the ‘workers’ of the two political parties that had ruled the country turn by turn.
The ‘turn by turn’ rule returned after the fall of General Pervez Musharraf, and a race between the leaderships of the two ruling parties began as to who would be the beneficiary of the sale of the National Carrier along with its very ‘valuable’ but shockingly under-valued assets.
Mian Nawaz Sharif and his team seem to be winning this race. But one can’t help wishing at this point that the idea of setting up a new airline would be a part of a plan to rebuild PIA. It can be so. Maybe some patriotic mind in the government has a plan to use the immense manpower and facilities (as well as assets) at the PIA’s disposal to run two airlines instead of one. Distribution of overhead costs can make both the airlines running side by side economical as well as competitive.
But it is only wishful thinking. The record of the PML (N) leadership shows that they are fond of ‘new’ ventures in which tons of money taken out from the National Treasury can be put in and burnt as fuel. Most of these ‘tons’ are siphoned off to undisclosed destinations.
