Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: The main opposition parties, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), on Tuesday censured Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government for its performance in its two years of power, terming it an “unmitigated disaster”.
PML-N president and National Assembly Opposition Leader Shehbaz Sharif tweeted that “Imran Khan’s mismanagement of national affairs has increased the woes of the masses manifold”.
“People continue to pay [a] heavy price for this failed experiment in political engineering,” he added.
Shortly afterward, PPP chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari took to Twitter to lambast the prime minister’s performance as well.
“[Two] years in power and Imran Khan has given us the worst economy in our country’s history, foreign policy failures from Kashmir to Saudi, democracy and human rights suffering, unemployment at an all time, transparency international has said corruPTIon is higher than before,” he tweeted.
Talking to the media later in the day, PPP Information Secretary Nafisa Shah criticised the PTI government for increasing inflation and national debt. “I challenge PTI to tell the people how much was one child indebted [to the IMF] when it came into power and how much is one child indebted now.”
She added that the PTI government had dropped a “bomb of inflation” on the people. “There has been a 102 per cent increase in wheat prices from when we were in government and 70-80pc increase in sugar prices. The price of oil in our government was 40pc less than it is today.
“The tsunami of inflation has broken the [people’s] backs,” she said.
She criticised the government for “giving in” to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), saying that after the “PTI-IMF government, now the PTI-IMF-FATF government would rule [over people]”. She added that they would enact laws which would force businesses to shut down.
She also lashed out at the government for what she termed the “destruction of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA)”.
“The damage they have caused to PIA, we repeatedly say it counts as treason. They have caused Rs90-100bn loss to PIA so far and it was [because of] one statement that the minister made in the Assembly. We have not been told [to] date who these pilots were,” she added.
