Sindh Assembly opposition leader Firdous Shamim Naqvi has said the current and former chief ministers of the province must become answerable for the present sorry state of affairs of Sindh.
The opposition leader, who belongs to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, spoke for almost three hours on the provincial budget for the next fiscal year in the Sindh Assembly on Tuesday. His speech contained serious criticism of the PPP government, but during all this time none of the treasury lawmakers interrupted him.
Naqvi said corruption had become a serious ailment of the country and only accountability being carried out on a transparent basis could cure this problem. He alleged that hidden properties of the top PPP leaders, Asif Ali Zardari and Faryal Talpur, had been exposed. “The property of Aleema Baji has also been uncovered. We will also punish Aleema Baji. Whosoever commits theft will be caught even if he is Liaquat Jatoi,” he said while talking about the sister of Prime Minister Imran Khan and former Sindh CM and PTI Sindh leader Liaquat Jatoi.
“We stand by the process of clean and transparent accountability. We will raise our voice to the fullest extent wherever oppression is committed.” He said the government was under an obligation to end what he called “black economy” from the country. “This country belongs to all of us and we will jointly take it forward,” he said.
He alleged that the report of the auditor general of Pakistan had pointed out that no proper discussion had taken place in the meetings of the Public Accounts Committee (of the Sindh Assembly) from 1992 to 2018.
The opposition leader said a proper audit was not conducted in any of the departments of the Sindh government. He said the Pakistan Peoples Party ruling in Sindh had been far from ending its lavish and wasteful expenditure. He lamented that the shadow provincial budget presented by the opposition PTI in Sindh had been rejected by the ruling party.
He welcomed the confession of Sindh Education Minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah a day earlier in the house that around 100,000 teachers associated with the government-run schools even lacked the capability to teach. He said that the incumbent education minister was different from the rest of his cabinet colleagues in the province as he used to speak the truth.
The opposition leader said secretaries of different provincial departments were transferred quite frequently as a sort of the game of “musical chair”. He requested the CM not to change the secretary of the education department frequently.
He said only education could ensure a better future of Pakistan. He said the rate of literacy in Sindh had decreased over the past year, whereas in other provinces the literacy rate had increased by one percent. Naqvi said attendance of students in government-run secondary schools in Sindh was merely 47 percent.
He said Karachi could not be developed without meeting its water supply demand. He added that the provincial government had failed to evolve a strategy to provide water to the city in accordance with its demand.
He claimed the government had not launched any scheme to install any new reverse osmosis water filtration plants in the city. He said more than of half of the existing RO plants in Karachi were non-functional and a similar situation was persisting in the rest of Sindh.
He said none of the treasury lawmakers in the house were answerable to this situation. He said the PPP had the manifesto of providing food, shelter and clothing to the masses, but during its uninterrupted rule in the province lasting over a decade it had failed to build any housing facility in Karachi. He said the new budget lacked any clear vision or clearly defined goals.