LAHORE: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Central Punjab General Secretary Hammad Azhar has said that the economy is on the brink of collapse and only a new, competent government can ease the economic crisis.
“A strong government with competent ministers should come into power at the earliest for five years and impose an economic emergency to overcome the economic challenges, otherwise our economy will collapse,” the former federal minister said while talking to media outside the residence of PTI Chairman Imran Khan here on Wednesday.
He warned that the situation was critical and hence we all should sit together and prudently handle the situation, adding that Pakistan still has time to prevent the disaster. He said that the imported rulers were least interested in managing the economy and other affairs of the country, it was only preoccupied with their corruption cases, ‘managing’ the institutions and posting people of their liking. “The government has no roadmap to rescue the troubled economy,” he added.
The former federal minister castigated Federal Finance Minister Ishaq Dar for misleading the people on the state of the economy; “he says the country’s default risk rate crossing 100 percent and international credit rating agencies downgrading our economy was meaningless”. “For the Finance Minister, only his views on the economy were meaningful,” he added.
He averred that Dar claims that the value of the rupee against the dollar should be Rs 190 whereas it stands at Rs 245 in the open market, adding that the government has not read the situation and does not know where the economy was heading in the past seven months. “The regime change blunder has played havoc with our economy and someone has to be held accountable for it. In our tenure, the economy was progressing at 6 percent per annum while industries were expanding and exports were increasing. Today, industries were closing down,” he added.
Azhar questioned who was behind the regime change that has brought the economy on the verge of collapse, and who was interfering in political matters and subsequently imposing incompetent rulers on the nation. He pointed out that both industries and trade sectors were facing a crisis, but there were no industries or trade ministers to handle the situation while the country was going through the worst energy crisis and its minister was nowhere to be seen. “It seems the Federal Energy Minister also has no plan to handle the crisis while the finance minister has his strange logic to analyze the economic situation. A bunch of jokers have been imposed on us and those responsible for it have to be held accountable; we all know who was responsible for this,” he added.
To a question, he said that Punjab Chief Minister Pervaiz Elahi will meet the PTI Chairman within a few days. He was confident that the CM will not back out from his pledge made to the PTI Chairman; he will honor his words.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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