“A war in the Persian Gulf is plunging Pakistan into darkness,” reports The Straits Times:
Electricity has become a luxury for Mohammad Rizwan. Over the past week, the 52-year-old has faced daily blackouts at his house in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital. When he leaves for his office in the morning, there is no power. When he gets home, the electricity is still out. His kitchen gets piped gas only two hours a day, forcing the family to rely on expensive cylinders. “These outages have taken us back to the stone age,” said Rizwan, who lives with his wife, mother and two children in a bustling, densely populated neighborhood near the city center.
A global energy crisis has been the result of the seven-week war in the Persian Gulf, which cut off vital flows of oil and gas. Few nations have suffered more as a result than Pakistan, “which was already grappling with fragile public finances and a war with neighboring Afghanistan even before US strikes began.”
The country has made itself an unlikely mediator in the Middle East, leveraging its close ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the US and China to provide communication channels. It has hosted talks in Islamabad — a diplomatic coup. But as those look set to resume, even negotiators in five-star comfort may well find themselves relying on generators.”
Little over a week after the war began in Iran, Pakistan was already introducing austerity measures, such as closing shops and restaurants early, cutting back spending and encouraging civil servants to work from home. Prices shot up at the pump, and even the Pakistan Super League — its top cricket tournament — told fans to stay home.
The situation has since gotten worse, due to shortage of liquefied natural gas, a vital power plant fuel that Pakistan usually obtains from Qatar, a Persian Gulf nation that is the world’s second-largest exporter. Between the closed strait and a drone attack on the giant Ras Laffan plant a month ago, the emirate has not shipped a single cargo in weeks.
The crunch could not come at a worse time for Pakistan, as temperatures rise today to 96 degrees in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital and second largest city. Rising temperatures in Pakistan are increasing air conditioner use and the need for electricity.
“Pakistan’s energy ministry has said that load-shedding — the term for planned blackouts — would be implemented in the evenings for two to three hours.” Yet interviews with households and businesses across the country suggest that the outages are lasting far longer — in some districts, more than half the day. The Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry reports that some industries are facing around eight hours of load-shedding, a heavy blow to local and export-focused manufacturing.
Factories report being forced to halt at night, while households are installing illegal pumps to try to extract more gas from pipes. Cellphone service towers are switching off, and diesel generators and batteries are flying off the shelves. Even many of the country’s solar panels — a success story — operate without a battery to keep costs down, and so rely on the grid for backup when the sun stops shining.
When global fuel supplies contract, richer countries typically pay up. The Third World, however, “just stops consuming — as happened in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered an earlier gas emergency. Four years on, history is repeating itself for Pakistan.”
Pakistan is not the only country adversely impacted by the Iran War. Egypt also has been deeply affected. Its capital, the great city of Cairo, goes dark early due because the Egyptian government has ordered businesses to close early to conserve fuel, which has become much more expensive due to the war. The 23 million people who live in Greater Cairo have been deeply affected.
“Soaring fuel costs due to US-Israel war on Iran have pushed the Egyptian government to issue a month-long early-closing order. Small businesses are scrambling to adapt,” reports Africa News.
At a cafe in downtown Cairo, where people used to play dominoes until 2 am, the lights abruptly shut off 5 hours earlier “under new early-closing orders enacted to curb Egypt’s soaring energy bill due to the US-Israel war on Iran. The month-long order instituted last week shutters shops at 9:00 pm on weekdays and 10:00 pm on weekends.”
It’s a culture shock for residents of Cairo, who often stay up late into the night:
Thursday nights usually buzz with families strolling between storefronts, teenagers lingering over ice cream and music spilling out of cafes, well into the early hours of the morning.
Now each evening collapses into a final frantic hour of last-minute shopping before fluorescent lights flicker out and shutters rattle down.
Police patrols ensure compliance and soon only delivery scooters remain, zig-zagging through the dark.
The city once famed for never sleeping now “feels like COVID again,” a shopkeeper lamented, a reference to the 2020 lockdowns that emptied Cairo’s streets. “Well-to-do Cairenes have flocked to Nileside restaurants and international hotels, exempt from the order as tourism establishments. But small businesses are already feeling the squeeze.”
One shop owner “estimates his shop has lost more than half its revenue in a matter of days. Officials say the decision was unavoidable, given the country’s heavy reliance on imported fuel. Global energy prices have surged since the US and Israeli war on Iran began in late February.
Egypt’s monthly energy import bill more than doubled from January to March, spiking to $2.5 billion. Three-fifths of the $20 billion in oil Egypt buys each year goes toward powering its electrical grid: “In recent weeks, the government has introduced what it calls ‘exceptional’ measures, including hiking fuel prices, slowing state projects, enacting remote work on Sundays and dimming streetlights.”
