The governance of the country is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the elected people. It is very sad that our elected representatives are not aware of the sensitivity of the situation. They have dealt every crisis in an abrupt manner. Good governance has become an unfulfilled dream. To run the country, our representatives are supposed to make short term and long term plans. If we look into the short term plans, they have completely failed to sowe any, not even one, of the many crises we are currently going through. The RPPs emerged as a short term policy to eradicate the energy crisis and based upon the projections of power to be generated by these RPPs, the government announced that there would be no load shedding after 31st of December. The promise failed as have many others in the past. To the utter astonishment of the people of Pakistan, the Asian Development Bank announced that most of these RPPs are not feasible for the country. This announcement came when our government had already paid 14% advance payment to these units. This goes to show how far sighted our chosen representatives are. They are not even able to prescribe the correct short term policies. How can we expect them to have the vision to formulate the long-term policies far into the future? The energy crisis was being predicted well in advance during the 1990s but no action was taken in this regard as all politicians were busy in leg-pulling in the climb up the greasy pole. Now was the chance to make amends for it but even that has gone begging. We have severe doubts that they have any plans now to make up for the short fall. A long term plan is construction of a big dam but that seems to be out of question at the moment. There is no hope for us in the foreseeable future. -UMAR MAHBOOB, Lahore, February 3