Shehbaz Sharif criticises PTI’s 13-year rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, directs focus to people’s basic needs

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Saturday criticised the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) governance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, telling PML-N lawmakers from the province at a parliamentary party meeting in Islamabad that long-term projects should be put on hold for now and attention turned to short-term welfare work that meets people’s basic needs.

What thirteen years delivered

Shehbaz said the PTI had ruled the province for 13 years, promising hundreds of dams, hundreds of megawatts of solar power, and new hospitals, universities and schools, yet he asked how many new universities and hospitals had actually been built and how far healthcare had really improved. From Peshawar to Kohistan and Hazara, and across the province’s southern districts, he said, most people would say very little, if anything, had been done for their basic needs, and he questioned whether public funds had been spent transparently.

The cost of terrorism

The prime minister said terrorism in the province had been reduced to a considerable extent by 2017-18, and praised the counter-terrorism policies adopted after the 2014 Army Public School tragedy under Nawaz Sharif. He said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had made great sacrifices, noting that about 80,000 people had been killed by terrorism in Pakistan and that the economy had suffered losses estimated at Rs15,000 billion. He also criticised the decision to allow militants from Afghanistan to settle in Swat, and recalled that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2014 visit had to be postponed during the D-Chowk sit-in.

Emergency rule and the way forward

Shehbaz said hundreds of billions of rupees had been allocated to the provincial government under a special National Finance Commission arrangement to fight terrorism, and asked how many Safe City projects had been started and how much had been spent on the Counter-Terrorism Department, adding that even Rs80 billion spent on police and law enforcement would have left them better equipped. He said a committee of the PPP and PML-N had negotiated with the PTI for 48 hours and finalised a draft, but approval from then chief minister Sohail Afridi never came, leaving the federal government compelled to impose emergency and governor’s rule on October 11, a decision he said was timely and later approved by a joint sitting of parliament. He directed the province’s PML-N lawmakers to prioritise basic needs so that people’s fortunes could turn around within six months to a year.