Govt hostage to mafias, lobbies, personalities: Siraj

LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer Senator Sirajul Haq has stressed that the failure of the PTI government to deliver reflects the failure of system as the government is hostage to mafias, lobbies and personalities.

If ever genuine accountability is done in the country, the ruling elite would find no escape route, he said while talking to the media after addressing a central training workshop at Mansoorah on Thursday.

Previously, he said the governments made annual budgets but today budgets are made on a daily basis as prices of all basic commodities and utilities are being determined by the IMF and donor agencies, pushing the prices of power, petrol, gas and food to record heights. He said the medicine prices were raised to over 300 per cent by the PTI government, causing the people to die without medical treatment. “Inflation has reached the level where people cannot find any means to make both ends meet,” he said and added the PTI government felled Pak rupee to a level worse than ordinary paper as Afghani and Bhutani currencies are now better than it, but Prime Minister Imran Khan never took its notice and has been beating about the bush.

Siraj lamented that both ruling and opposition alliances are slave to their vested interests and have no consideration of the masses’ problems as the country presents a picture of worst governance. Both sides have awarded Senate tickets to billionaires having ill-gotten money and willing to plunder more. He said all governments and opposition parties comprise the same political figures who have been supporting the status quo to maintain their control over public money and state affairs.

He took exception to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s statement to oversee the process of Senate elections himself, terming it an open admission of pre-poll rigging and interference with the election commission’s affairs. He expressed sorrow over what he called one-sided accountability in which majority of the corrupt elements were dry-cleaned by joining the king’s party while hardly any corrupt elements in the bureaucracy were held accountable.