Economic crisis: Imran vows to take ‘unprecedented’ decisions if voted into power again

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman and ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday said that he would take unprecedented decisions to steer the country out of the economic crisis if his party is voted into power again.

Speaking at a seminar on the economy of Pakistan, organised by his party, he said “now is the time, we have to find out of the box solutions to govern the country like no one ever had”.

“We’ve to take concrete measures and something which no one never took before so that we can cope with the challenge of the devastation due to recent floods,” he added.

Khan admitted that his administration was not prepared to run the country when it came into power back in 2018, saying he had talked to Shaukat Tarin, the ex-finance minister of his party that the PTI should be well prepared to deal with the challenges this time around when it comes to power.

He said that the top-most priority of his party would be to protect the vulnerable from the skyrocketing inflation especially, in the wake of the recent devastation caused by monsoon floods all over the country.

Referring to his party’s international telethon a day ago, through which he collected over Rs5 billion within a short time of three hours, the PTI chairman said that “the people at the helm of affairs must have realized that it is the foreign funding through which his party had been collecting donations to help people in the country like it did yesterday”.

“This is what they call foreign funding,” he took a jibe at the rulers who question the foreign funding to the party, saying “the expatriate Pakistanis are the assets for the country and we should acknowledge their contribution who are always there whenever we needed them”.

“The imported regime must have seen our “foreign funding” yesterday through which we collected Rs5 billion for the flood victims…this is how we get foreign funding,” Khan said while referring to his political rivals’ criticism of his party’s funding from overseas Pakistanis.

He said overseas Pakistanis will play an important role in stabilising the country’s economy, adding “we are devising strategy as to how we can facilitate overseas Pakistanis to invest in the country.”

Khan recalled that during his last stint in power he could not solve many issues confronting the country due to political instability as opposition from the day one wanted to topple his party’s government.

He said that he was aware of the conspiracy against his government from day one, adding first, Nawaz Sharif, who had been convicted by the top court of the country, fled to the UK under the pretext of being ill, and then Shehbaz Sharif returned home from London while putting mask as if he was a “Covid-19 specialist”.

He also accused the ruling PML-N of doing politics when the country was facing the coronavirus pandemic, saying Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and other leaders of the party had been expecting the hospitals would be filled and the economy would slip out of hand, but we managed everything quite good and earned accolades worldwide.

He said he started two major projects – Ravi City and Bundal Island – both of which he said had the potential to attract foreign investment worth billions of dollars.

He lamented that Sindh provincial government cancelled the no objection certificate (NOC) for Bundal Island project and the builder mafia got a stay order which halted the work on Ravi City project for 11 months.

Hitting out at the incumbent rulers, he said they did not take any step to improve the lives of the masses as their only objective is to get relief in corruption cases.

“They mocked me when I started the billion tree tsunami project…they [the political opponents] did not make any long-term plans to protect the country from climate change,” he added.

Taimur Khan Jhagra, the provincial minister for finance Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa said that the “incumbent regime had generated Rs1.7 billion profit after one year, and you set a record by collecting Rs5 billion within three hours”.

Speaking on the occasion, former minister for energy Omar Ayub Khan said that finance minister Miftah Ismail “lies; he doesn’t lie through his teeth, he lies blatantly”.

Through “an integrity statement on the floor of National Assembly, he added, “finance minister Miftah admitted the agreements signed during his party government were wrong, expensive as they had front loaded payments.”

He said that the capacity fixed payment for the power plants would reach Rs1455 billion by 2023, adding the power tariff is going to be more than Rs45 per unit due to flawed policies of the incumbent regime.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022