KARACHI: Chairman of the National Business Group Pakistan, President of the Pakistan Businessmen and Intellectuals Forum (PBIF) and the All Karachi Industrial Alliance, and former provincial minister Mian Zahid Hussain on Monday said some politicians are destroying the country for the sake of power.
He said that people facing record inflation are fed up with political tussles between different political parties.
Zahid Hussain said that increasing the price of gas will have a negative impact on the country’s economy and production will be affected, while bread will become even more expensive.
Talking to the business community, the veteran business leader said that will increase with the new gas tariff as they are already facing 25 percent general and 35 percent food inflation.
He said that failed politicians want to get power at any cost for which they are staking the future of the country and there is no one to stop them.
At present, people are running after flour, there is no milk for infants, people are deprived of electricity and gas in winter, there is no medicine in hospitals and there is a scarcity of many items including food items, medical equipment, spare parts and industrial machinery etc.
The containers having essential items are stuck at the port the government does not have the dollars to redeem them, he said, adding that the country's population is rapidly falling below the poverty line, Pakistan ranks 99 out of 121 countries in the global hunger index, while terrorism has again become a serious problem.
Mian Zahid Hussain said that due to the efforts of the current government, friendly countries at Geneva conference have expressed their willingness to give more loans, but the problems with the IMF are still unresolved.
Pakistan has to pay twenty-one billion dollars this year and a total of seventy billion dollars in the next three years, the rollover of which is impossible without going into IMF discipline, he observed.
The business leader said that Pakistan's economy was much better than India's till 1980, but due to the losses of state-run companies, lack of focus on agriculture and industry, the lowest tax to GDP in the region and circular debt, etc., the treasury has become empty.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023