Prime Minister Imran Khan will visit Lahore today (Thursday) to speak to party leaders about selecting the best candidates for the local government polls to be held in Punjab in March or April 2022, according to a story in Dawn.

Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf will also hold a core committee meeting on Friday or Saturday, likely to be presided over by Khan, to determine the actual cause behind the loss in a province where the party has been in power for almost a decade.

The prime minister received a report on Wednesday about PTI's defeat in the recent local government election in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to Dawn, the report indicated that the selection of candidates was based on favouritism.**

K-P Chief Minister Mehmood Khan presented the report according to sources in the Prime Minister Office.

The prime minister grilled by Khan for not selecting sound candidates.

However, PTI leader Noor Alam Khan said during a TV show that the selection of candidates was not to blame for PTI’s defeat in K-P. Noor has been a member of the National Assembly in 2013 and 2018 from Peshawar.

The MNA blamed the party’s poor performance, while adding that people in villages did not even want to run on PTI’s ticket. He said that they visited many areas but they could not garner support, while citing the price hike and unemployment as the main reasons behind the lack of support.

Noor added that one cannot run a government solely based on social media accounts and Twitter. He further alleged that when he had raised issues that people were facing, he had to go prove his innocence before the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in a case of assets beyond means.

He was of the opinion that the second phase of local elections will not yield better results, unless there were measures taken to tackle the issues faced by the people. However, he dismissed the notion of filing a no-confidence motion against the prime minister or supporting one if it came up.

When Dawn contacted Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, he said that even though the ruling party failed to secure top slots in polls, they gave a tough time to its opponents and secured seats at village council levels. He said the party has learned its lesson and will field better candidates for the next phase of polls, slated for January 2022.

A day after blaming the selection of candidates, the prime minister took to Twitter to declare that due to the noise of election results, people were losing sight of the fact that “the government had empowered the LG system for the first time in 74-year history of Pakistan.”