Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari Friday slammed the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government for ‘compromising on the economic rights of the people of Pakistan’ and accepting all the demands put forward by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Speaking to media in Lahore, the PPP chairman also questioned the PTI government’s decision to involve country’s intelligence agencies in crackdown against smuggling of food items and other goods. “Are they [intelligence agencies] supposed to fight terrorism, or are they supposed to investigate the fallout from the current government’s economic policies?” he asked, referring to a directive of Prime Minister Imran Khan to the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to monitor crackdown against smuggling of food items.
Bilawal alleged that the incumbent government does not know how to run the country’s economy. “The government is not fulfilling the promises it had made, and the promises they made were incorrect,” he said, and further lamented that the government took over a year to approach the IMF for a bailout package.
The PPP chairman also criticised the PTI government’s deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “What kind of a deal is this where the IMF representative come to Pakistan, speak to the head of the State Bank who was also associated with the Fund in the past, and decide the economic rights of the people?” he wondered. “The people of Pakistan should be making these decisions. But this is only possible if government representatives have been elected by the people,” he said. “They were not considering the lives of the common man, they do not understand how Pakistan’s economy works. They gave incorrect tax collection targets to the IMF as they are not aware of the country’s capacity,” he said. “Even after they revised their targets, they were unable to meet their goal, the burden of which inevitably fell on the people,” he added.
Bilawal said that the government cannot document the economy in one go when it knows that a huge section of Pakistan’s economy is undocumented. “You are making the businesses afraid. By setting the CNIC requirement, you have taken the energy out of the economy,” he lamented.
“There are people in the country who are not paying taxes, but that doesn’t mean that all of them are robbers, are involved in unscrupulous activities or are corrupt. You need to reform the tax system,” the PPP chief said. “But they [the government] decided to use the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the FIA, and the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to document the economy by force,” he said. “The point of an economy is to invest in the people in order to promote economic activities. But this government is squeezing the life out of the economy,” he added.
