KARACHI: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan Sunday announced that he will contest the upcoming general election from Karachi.
Addressing a gathering in city’s Gulistan-e-Jauhar area, the PTI chief said that Karachi was the city people would come to spend their vacations. He said that Karachi used to run the entire system of the country, adding that the division caused Karachi a lot of damage. He said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had the highest rate of terrorism but today it was a peaceful province.
The PTI chairman is in Karachi on a two-day visit. Upon his arrival at the airport, he briefly addressed a small gathering of employees of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) who had gathered to welcome him.
The PTI chief said the current government had only three months of its tenure left and that it didn’t have the mandate to privatise the state-run institution. The Sharif family’s steel mills churn out millions whereas the Pakistan Steel Mills is lying closed, he lamented. There is no need for privatisation if the institutions are governed with honesty, he added.
Imran said nowhere in the world such practice of selling out national institutions existed. He said that after coming into power, his party will turn PIA into a world-class airline. “National institutions are not for sale and we have proved it by successfully running the Khyber Bank rather than selling it out,” he said, adding that end to political interference in state institutions was need of the hour.
Later in the day, Imran attended a doctors’ forum where he stressed on the need to combat poverty in the country. “Today, we are lagging behind in human development [compared to the rest of the subcontinent] because no government ever took responsibility for pulling the people out of poverty,” the PTI chairman said.
He said that the government’s efforts should focus on breaking the vicious cycle of poverty. “In Pakistan, only policies are made. There is no real thought on how to reduce the poverty.”
Drawing attention to Lahore, Imran Khan declared it the world’s most polluted city, adding that 70 per cent of the city’s population didn’t have access to the safe drinking water.
Taking aim at Punjab chief minister, Imran said that Shehbaz Sharif has had a budget of billions of rupees yet he did not build a single new hospital in the region.
Published in Daily Times, March 5th 2018.
