Whose Lives Count on Primetime? From Mir Raza Ali to the Silent Victims of Electricity Bills

Let me begin where every honest sentence on this subject must begin: I condemn, without reservation, the murder of Mir Raza Ali, the 25-year-old founder of Karachi’s beloved dessert brand Wafflix. He left his home before dawn on July 28, 2026, telling his mother he would return in ten minutes. He never did. His body was found the next day in the bushes of Gulistan-e-Jauhar, bearing torture marks and a gunshot wound. Eighteen days later, his family still waits for the truth, and I appeal — as every citizen should — for a swift, transparent investigation and justice for his killers. Nothing that follows in this essay is meant to diminish that grief. It is meant to sit beside it, uneasily, and ask why our grief is so selective.

Because for eighteen days now, Pakistan’s television screens have offered something close to a live tribunal. Home Minister Zia Ul Hassan Lanjar and Inspector General of Police Javed Alam Odho face anchors nightly. Forensic reports are dissected line by line. Postmortem findings, CCTV timelines, taxi records — every fragment of evidence is turned over on air with a rigor that would not embarrass The Hague. I do not begrudge this scrutiny; a young man is dead and the public deserves answers. But I confess, with something between astonishment and despair, that I cannot recall our media applying this same forensic hunger to the killing of the country’s economy. Even the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 — an event that reshaped this nation’s political history — did not receive this level of daily, granular dissection. Nor, in truth, did the world’s own gold standard for high-profile scrutiny, the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, sustain eighteen straight days of forensic-audit-level coverage in the country that lost him.

So where is that same appetite for NEPRA and CPPA? Here is what nobody puts on a talk show: over the past three years, dozens of Pakistanis — an elderly widow in Gujranwala, a mother of four in Jahanian, a young man in Faisalabad, a payphone operator in Peshawar — have taken their own lives after receiving electricity bills they could not pay. These were not abstractions. They were documented, named, buried. And yet no anchor has spent eighteen consecutive nights asking the chairman of NEPRA why. No panel has summoned the CEO of the Central Power Purchasing Agency to explain, plainly, in language a shopkeeper in Bahadurabad could understand, why this country of 260 million people pays some of the region’s highest power tariffs while its own regulator’s reports describe capacity sitting idle. Where is the media trial of the men who told us, from 2014 to 2018, that imported coal would be Pakistan’s “game changer,” and of the former prime minister who made the same promise about LNG-fired plants? Those promises are now line items in a debt-trapped economy, in a nation reduced, again and again, to a global begging bowl. But no one is asked to answer for them on camera. They sit, as it were, behind a veil — while the Director General of ISPR and the Chief of Defence Forces routinely stand before microphones and take hard questions. Why can Pakistan’s military spokesmen face the public, but not the men who set the price of electricity for every household in the country?

I want to be precise, not merely aggrieved, so let me offer what I found when I went looking myself. CPPA-G’s own energy purchase data for May–June 2026 shows three nearly identical imported-coal plants — Huaneng Shandong Ruyi at Sahiwal (1,244 MW), China Power Hub in Balochistan (1,249 MW), and Port Qasim in Karachi (1,243 MW) — dispatched at wildly different rates. Huaneng ran at roughly 73 percent of capacity; Port Qasim at only 36 percent; China Power Hub at a mere 24 percent — this despite Huaneng being, by current fuel charges, the most expensive of the three at roughly Rs. 20.38 per unit, against Rs. 15.12 for Port Qasim and Rs. 16.09 for Hub. If Pakistan’s Economic Merit Order genuinely governed dispatch, the cheaper southern plants should be running harder, not idling at a quarter of their design capacity. Something else is deciding who generates and who doesn’t — transmission bottlenecks, take-or-pay contract terms that favor Sahiwal, or simple operational failure at Hub, whose output fell 37 percent in a single month. Whatever the cause, Pakistani consumers are still paying full capacity charges for roughly 760 to 940 idle megawatts at each underused plant — fixed costs for electricity that was never produced, quietly folded into tariffs nobody explains on air.

This is not a call to relent on Mir Raza Ali. It is a plea that the same courage be extended elsewhere. I am not asking media to abandon one grieving family; I am asking whether this nation’s curiosity has been rationed, aimed carefully at the stories that move ratings but never at the ledgers that move our poverty. Who decides that a private tragedy in Gulistan-e-Jauhar deserves eighteen days of forensic television, while a public catastrophe costing every household thousands of rupees a month deserves none? Is there a veil, a ghost hand, guiding our screens away from NEPRA’s boardroom and toward whatever is easier to sell?

My request to Pakistan’s media is respectful, not accusatory: summon the chairman and members of NEPRA and the CEO of CPPA, and ask them, on camera, to explain the dispatch logic behind May and June’s generation data, to quantify what idle capacity is costing consumers per unit, to say plainly whether transmission constraints are forcing reliance on costlier northern plants while cheaper southern capacity sits dark, and to commit to passing any findings transparently through the Fuel Charges Adjustment mechanism, as the NEPRA Act itself demands.

Pakistan is the fifth most populous nation on earth, and yet the men who preside over its power sector — the chairmen and members of NEPRA and OGRA, the leadership of CPPA, the ministers of planning, the former prime ministers who made their promises and moved on — appear to enjoy something no statute grants them on paper: an unwritten, lifetime immunity from the reckoning our media reserves for everyone else. Energy security is not a footnote to economic policy. It is the mother of both economic and military security, because a nation that cannot keep its factories running or its grid stable cannot arm, feed, or defend itself for long. When leadership failures in that sector helped push this country toward a global begging bowl, that failure was not merely technical. In every sense but the narrowly legal one, it was a betrayal of the public trust this nation placed in them.

I choose my words carefully here, because Pakistan’s treason law — the treason act of the Constitution is not applied to this powerful elite. But look at how nations that actually take energy security seriously behave. In India and the United States, a major failure of grid reliability or fuel-supply planning triggers parliamentary and congressional inquiries, regulatory resignations, and criminal referrals where negligence crosses into fraud — energy security is treated as inseparable from national security, not as a line item to be quietly absorbed into next month’s bill. In Pakistan, three nearly identical power plants can run at 73, 36, and 24 % of capacity in the same two months; consumers can be billed in full for the idle 760 to 940 megawatts regardless, and not one name is put to the decision. If the erosion of 260 million people’s livelihoods does not meet the law’s narrow definition of treason, it should still be named just as loudly on moral grounds — on the same channels that spent eighteen days dissecting a single death.

Even our own interior minister has said the quiet part aloud. When Mohsin Naqvi told the Pakistan Economic Summit in July that “the system we are living under has collapsed,” the cameras stayed on him for days — but almost entirely to speculate about new provinces and administrative reshuffles, a political-reset story. Not one primetime panel used that admission of collapse to ask the harder, duller question: what, specifically, collapsed, and who was holding the wheel when it did? A minister said the word “collapse” about his own country and even that did not buy energy accountability a single evening on air.

As an engineer who has worked inside this country’s accountability apparatus, I hold reports that speak plainly to these failures. If Pakistan’s own media will not put them to air, I am prepared to send them to the BBC, CNN, and any outlet still willing to ask NEPRA and CPPA the questions our own press has avoided — because the International Federation of Journalists’ Global Charter of Ethics binds every journalist, wherever they sit, to truth, independence, and public accountability before comfort or convenience. If the truth is unwelcome at home, it will still be told somewhere.

So let this be the last word, addressed directly to the anchors, editors, and owners of Pakistan’s newsrooms: you have shown, this month, that you know how to hold power to account when the victim has a name and a face. NEPRA, OGRA, and CPPA have names and faces too. Summon them. Sit them under the same lights. Ask them the same unrelenting questions. Until you do, every ratings-driven hour spent elsewhere is itself a kind of answer — and the 260 million people paying for idle megawatts already know what that answer is.