Catastrophe after catastrophe shook the country on March 31, 2015. On the one hand, a blackout left the entire country without electricity. On the other, one of our public prosecutors was murdered in his office at the Justice Hall in Istanbul in a terrorist attack. We were saddened by both incidents. My opinion is that both incidents suggest we should give some thought to the administrative system in Turkey and the way this system operates. I believe there are significant similarities between the two incidents in terms of administrative incompetence. I believe both incidents clearly reveal our lack of a smart state. I don’t think Turkey can boost its hi-tech exports in the absence of a smart state. Let me take it one at a time…

For one, on March 31, 2015, electricity went out all across Turkey. Let me correct that: All across Turkey with the exception of the province of Van. The incident that had a nasty impact on the lives of some 70mn people had already been included in Wikipedia yesterday. It ranked 8^th among the top unscheduled blackouts in history listed by the number of people affected by the incident. The top 7 included countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. One rank below us, at number 9, was the unscheduled blackout that took place in the northeastern US in 2003, including New York City. Calculating by our 2014 national income announced recently, more than $130mn-worth of output is produced in Turkey every hour. Therefore, we should conclude that the cost of a 7-hour-long unscheduled power outage for Turkey stood in the vicinity of $1bn.

So why did we have to bear the burden of that $1bn cost?

I think that the incident has to do with the administrative capacity in the electricity transmission system. Have you ever thought how you get electricity at home as you turn on the switch? Even if you don’t use it, someone makes it available at all times just in case you may want to use it. A massive mechanism has to function efficiently every second in order to make it available at all times. First of all, a range of power plants, public and private, generate electricity. Then the electricity enters the transmission system to be distributed within and outside the country. The transmission system, the electrical backbone of the country, is maintained by TEİAŞ, a public company. Public and private electricity distribution companies around the country take the generated electricity from the transmission line and distribute it to households and factories. Where did this latest mishap come from? My understanding from what experts say is that it demonstrates that TEİAŞ has failed to carry out its task in an effective way.

Why? Electricity supply and demand have to be equal at all times on the transmission line. If, for some reason, electricity supply drops rapidly and the equilibrium is upset, there is an excessive burden on the system, which flats out. That is what happened the other day. A power plant went offline for some reason. The equilibrium was upset.

TEİAŞ did not have a standby electricity generation capacity that it could bring online right away. There is the first structural defect for you. A modern system that allows the striking of a deal with those that can take their facilities offline right away under “demand side participation” was not set up either. There is the second defect. An intervention could be made right away to cut off the electricity of an average size city. But that failed too. We did not have a smart grid system that could do that automatically in the first place. There is the third structural defect. Circuit breaker mechanisms that could contain the problem to a certain part of the country did not come online somehow either. The electricity went out across the entire country. We suffered losses of at least $1bn. I guess everyone will sue TEİAŞ now. While a helicopter-borne inspection by Mr. Minister regarding transmission lines makes it as a press release on the TEİAŞ webpage, there was no explanation as I wrote these lines about the reason for the incident and the measures to be taken so that it doesn’t happen again. We have an administration that hasn’t drawn the necessary lessons almost two decades on after the onset of electricity privatizations. Energy Ministry officials probably learned that they should pay as much attention to the electricity generation-transmission-distribution system as they do to natural gas. It turned out to be quite an expensive lesson.

In the second incident we witnessed on March 31, 2015, two terrorists entered the Istanbul Hall of Justice with their weapons and took hostage a public prosecutor working in his office. Ultimately, the public prosecutor died in his office. Everyone discusses the incident from various aspects, questioning why this or that happened the way that they did. To be frank, I don’t know the details of the issue. But there is one aspect that I see, one that I believe no one is addressing:  I believe we have to seriously question the mentality of privatizing services without due deliberation.

Do you know how security services are provided in the Hall of Justice? Make an online search with the keywords “Hall of Justice private security” if you like and see for yourself the number of private security companies providing service in this field. Turkey has come to build massive halls of justice but doesn’t appear to have given it much thought as to how to protect those halls. Halls of justice are protected by and large by private security companies today. And is that private security service recruited by our justice system according to some special procedures? A different procedure, say, that takes into account the quality of service? Nay. It is outsourced under the same tendering system as we know it, the one that was primarily designed to carry out construction tenders and things. The job eventually goes to whoever makes the lowest bid. At the end of the day, private security officers, who have received god knows how much job training, paid minimum wages, stand at the gates of justice halls and try to ensure our security. I think there is grave negligence on the part of the administration here.

40 years on from the onset of privatizations, we still don’t know what kind of tender to hold in order to commission decent public service or what tendering methods are available for each different case. We seem to have failed to draw lessons from all the incidents that we have witnessed in the meantime. Now that our state has failed to draw a lesson for forty years, it does not seem to be a very smart state.

Without a smart state that boasts as much know-how as the private sector, that can offer project-based support and draw lessons from its mistakes right away, I doubt that Turkey can boost its hi-tech product exports. The incidents of March 31 were indicators of a serious lack of a smart state in Turkey, in my opinion. I happen to think that the priority of the country is the efficacy of the administration. I’ll explain that on another occasion.

This commentary was published in Radikal on 03.04.2015.