Summer’s coming, and stories of crippling blackouts in Sharjah are back in the news. Sleep-deprived residents are struggling to cope with the heat, and businesses are losing produce and profits in the absence of electricity. Even traffic lights have stopped working, worsening the daily chaos on the roads.
And yet Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA) has absolutely nothing to say.
Indeed, given that the very same disruptions to power supply occurred last year, one might have expected SEWA to have learned from the experience and actively put contingency plans in place. Of course, one might also have hoped that electricity capacity, or alternative supplies, could have been fixed over the previous 12 months.
It would appear though, sadly, that a government utility monopoly, with no competition (other than from individuals investing in back-up generators) has not felt it necessary to prepare itself over the past year to communicate with its customers should the power shortages reoccur.
So SEWA’s CEO is unavailable for comment and the company’s PR manager can only respond to the inevitable and entirely predictable media questions with: “If it’s about power outages we have no statement. We have no comment.“.
It therefore doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable that Sharjah residents and businessmen are furious, because the only logical conclusion of such a poor corporate response is that the company simply doesn’t care.
