Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting Marriyum Aurangzeb on Wednesday said that PM Shehbaz Sharif has ordered a review of the National Action Plan in the wake of the suicide attack in Karachi that claimed the lives of four people including three Chinese teachers.
The minister, addressing the media in Islamabad, strongly condemned the horrific blast in Karachi University while saying that the National Action Plan - formulated during in the wake of the Army Public School attack in 2014 during Nawaz Sharif’s tenure - had “restore peace in the country in consensus with all the provincial governments”.
She said that the law and order situation was reviewed during the cabinet meeting presided over by the premier. “It is among the top priorities of PM Shehbaz. He will soon coordinate with the Sindh government to get to the bottom of the extremely condemnable incident,” she added.
Power woes
Talking about power outages that are being reported across the country, Marriyum blamed it on the “corruption and incompetence” of the previous PTI-led government. “When the [last] PML-N government’s tenure ended, there were no power outages in Pakistan.”
She said it didn’t behoove Imran Khan or his supporters to blame the present government for economic problems and load-shedding. “The dearth of fuel for farmers and power plants is a result of the terrible planning by the PTI regime,” she said.
“Over the past two weeks, the PML-N government has restored 20 out of the 27 power plants that were shut down during the PTI regime,” she said adding that the issue of fuel shortage would resolved by May 7.
“There is no shortage of diesel but a case of hoarding. We have taken administrative-level action and you would see its impact over the next 48 hours.”
Price hike
The government spokesperson, while blaming Imran Khan’s ousted government for inflation, said that the situation might last for a while.
She also labelled the leaders associated with the PTI “shameless” for critcising the newly-elected premier over the country’s economic situation.
“The [PTI] people took inflation from 3.1 to 16 percent, buried the country under debt, left millions unemployed and pushed millions more below the poverty line have now started questioning the current government under PM Shehbaz as to why everything they destroyed over the last four years has not been fixed in two weeks!”
Foreign funding case
Talking on the foreign funding case, she said the PTI’s protest outside the ECP was merely an attempt to intimidate the electoral watchdog.
She said PTI has made it a habit to protest everything from parliamentary procedure, judicial decisions, the media and the ECP.
“Now he is attacking the election commission to harass it so the truth about PTI’s illegal foreign funding case stays buried as has been case for the past eight years,” she said.
“No amount of threats, harassment, hooliganism, violence and attacks by Imran Khan can force the chief election commissioner to resign or to hold snap elections.”
She said that Imran will have to answer for the “$7 million that was transferred into the accounts of PTI employees”. Marriyum said the money was given in the name of Disaster Management by the overseas Pakistanis and the Shaukat Khanum Hospital that were used for party.
She added that elections would be held once the ECP completes its constitutional obligation and as per the will of the people of Pakistan. “The country would not be allowed to be held hostage to Imran’s threats and hooliganism.”
