ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Climate Change Senator Sherry Rehman held the former government responsible for Pakistan’s mounting debt and public accounts crisis.
“The Imran Khan government used every opportunity it could get to make promises that have cost the country an unprecedented crisis in public finances, depleted foreign reserves, fiscal imbalance, runaway inflation, plummeting rupee, and an economy that was perilously near default.”
During her budget speech in the National Assembly, the minister claimed that the previous government ran a disastrous campaign of division instead of governance, which has left the country in shock from the dangerous lack of planning, transparency, or even a policy of prudent management. All they did was talk and run a non-stop political campaign for four years.
She went on to say that the PTI govt announced a revolution in 100 days when they came into power and yet the country stood with an almost doubled debt of Rs42,745 billion within 3 years and 10 months of the PTI government, adding that the country debt reached a total of Rs24, 953 billion in the last 70 years.
The PPP senator blamed that the PTI had tied the incumbent to the worst IMF agreement and then broke that agreement, leaving Pakistan doubly exposed to both the entire multilateral financial system, loss of sovereign credibility, and at home the crippling burden of spiraling prices in a landscape of extreme irresponsibility where no LNG was ordered nor plan made for the unfunded subsidies they doled out to gain political mileage for their gains at the expense of Pakistan.
Sherry Rehman continued that the previous government’s senseless and excessive spending, their vanity politics, culture wars, and growing division of the political spectrum reeks of a neo-fascist model, which in the blind pursuit of their cult politics eventually empties a country’s coffers when taken to extremes.
The federal minister said that unfortunately, even after leaving the economy in tatters, they continue to stoke the fires of political instability in the country, adding that it seems as if PTI’s goal is to lead the country into total chaos; how can this help the common person who will suffer the most from the stringent policies we have no choice but to employ? How can a party that claims to work for the country’s benefit continue to use unconstitutional ways to get its way?”
