ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) spokesperson Marriyum Aurangzeb said on Thursday that the “stooges” of the ruling party, before asking Shehbaz Sharif to resign as the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman, should ask their prime minister to step down for being wanted by the National Accountancy Bureau (NAB).
Addressing a joint press conference with former interior minister Ahsan Iqbal and former health minister Saira Afzal Tarar, she said, “PM Imran Khan should resign from office because he is wanted in the helicopter case. PML-N demands that both Imran and his benamidar sister Aleema be held and kept in NAB custody.”
Marriyum said the info minister’s presser was but a “flimsy effort at a fake higher moral pedestal” which Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) did not have. “A contest among government spokespersons desperate to please their wanted prime minister is underway,” she added.
The PML-N spokesperson further said that the behaviour was understandable amid the government’s failure to run the country and in the parliament. “Such gimmicks are the only distraction in the prevailing circumstances,” she added.
She further said that the PTI government needed to run the country with the same efficiency it made claims against members of the opposition.
Ahsan Iqbal said that PM Khan has been making false promises to the nation. He also accused the government of reintroducing projects which were announced and worked upon by previous governments, adding that the incumbent government had rebranded the visa policy of the PML-N government.
He also said that the “incompetence and inexperience” of the PTI government is one of the biggest hurdles in the country’s development. “Projects for all districts have been suspended. People are terrified due to the prevailing crisis of gas and electricity,” he added. He further said that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) were fully aware of the debt profile and current account deficit of Pakistan in 2018, but they still projected 6.0 per cent growth in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2019.
“The PML-N government curbed menace of terrorism and during its tenure, the economy grew from 3.0 per cent to 5.8 per cent of the GDP,” he said, adding that this year the economic growth had been forecast to slow down to 3.0 per cent of the GDP and the reason behind it was the prevailing political crisis.
Talking about the inflated gas bills received by domestic consumers, he said that the bills had been increased by 80 per cent and the consumers were sent collective bills for two months.
Former health minister Saira Afzal Tarar said that the amount of lies told by the incumbent government in its first six months is incomparable to any former government.
