ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) secretary information Marriyum Aurangzeb has strongly condemned the government’s proposed plans of auctioning national assets such as public parks and playgrounds and demanded to halt all these deals immediately.
Responding to the reports about the government’s plans to auction public parks, prominently, the Fatima Jinnah Public Park in Islamabad, the PML-N spokesperson criticized the PTI government’s policy and gave the credit to PML-N leadership for construction of various public parks and playgrounds.
“This is the difference between an elected and a “selected” government, as massive national projects were built under PML-N Quaid Nawaz Sharif and its President Shahbaz Sharif’s governments while under the “selected”, the country is being leased off and sold out,” she maintained. The then prime minister Nawaz Sharif had inaugurated the Fatima Jinnah Public Park in Islamabad in 1992.
“Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif had built playgrounds and parks while playgrounds and parks are being auctioned off in the so-called “New Pakistan”. Nawaz Sharif, Shahbaz Sharif built motorways, parks, hospitals, airports; Imran Khan is mortgaging and auctioning them all,” she maintained.
She further stated: “the failures of incompetent, unqualified and corrupt hoard of “selected” has turned Pakistan into an auction house. Imran Khan is committed to the agenda of “sell everything”. No patriotic Pakistani can even imagine doing what this “imposed” [PM] is doing and the ruthless and heartless manner in which these national assets are being mortgaged while being terribly undervalued,” she maintained.
“While the government mortgages national assets, including Fatima Jinnah Park, it knows that it will not be able to repay the loans and the lenders will make trillions by selling these assets,” she said, adding: “the nation should know how much money is going into whose pockets in these dodgy and dubious deals.”
She claimed that Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif worked day and night to increase Pakistan’s assets “while the “imposed Imran-led mafia government” was busy selling national assets off after robbing people’s flour, electricity, gas, medicine, jobs, businesses, and livelihoods.”
She also linked the proposed auctioning off the parks with the foreign funding case, saying, “it was the agenda of the illegal foreign funding from Pakistan’s enemy states which PTI is carrying out by mortgaging Pakistan’s assets. The effects of illegal foreign funding can be seen in every sector of Pakistan today. The biggest conspiracy against a country is to impose a useless, incompetent, thieving and corrupt government,” she further maintained.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021