KARACHI: Sindh Information and Labour Minister Saeed Ghani has said agitation on the roads of Karachi is not the right way to amend the provincial local government law; instead, the floor of the assembly should be used for advancing arguments for this purpose.
Addressing a press conference, Saeed Ghani responded to a query from a media person regarding the Jamaat-e-Islami’s sit-in that has been continuing outside the Sindh Assembly for three days.
Ghani said the option to further amend the provincial local government law was valid, but the assembly was the right forum to achieve that goal. He recalled that the opposition lawmakers had been twice given the opportunity in the recent past to present their proposed amendments to the local government law, but on both the occasions they had opted to stage a walkout and raise the issue outside the house.
The information minister was of the view that the main opposition political parties in Sindh — Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and Grand Democratic Alliance — knew very well that they had to face a crushing defeat if the local government elections were held in the province in the next four months.
He said the opposition parties had been using different undue delaying tactics to avoid such humiliation in the forthcoming municipal polls.
Ghani reiterated the stance of the government that it was ready to hold the local government elections in the province, soon after the Election Commission of Pakistan completed the exercise of fresh delimitations of constituencies. He said the Pakistan Peoples Party was of the view that the municipal polls would go in its favor.
The PTI had been completely wiped out in Sindh, and it was sheer nonsense to make the claim that the Tehreek-e-Insaf would form the next provincial government, he said, claiming that the MQM particularly wanted that the local government polls were not held in Sindh, as the party knew that it would meet the same fate as that of the PTI in the province.
He mentioned a recent statement made by a federal minister that the newly passed Sindh Local Government (Amendment) Bill had endangered the federation of Pakistan. He said the minister in question belonged to such a ruling party which soon after coming into power had abolished the local government set-up in Punjab. He recalled that the Supreme Court had later ordered reviving the local governments in Punjab, which the ruling party had again abolished just after one month.
Ghani further said that the “incompetent rulers” in the country even did not know that it was the federal government, and not the province, which conducted the population census, and that the provincial administration in Sindh had merely rendered assistance to complete the census exercise.
He recalled that the Sindh government’s request to share the census data with the deputy commissioners in districts of the province to resolve any objection had not been accepted by the Centre.
The information minister said the Centre had wrongly alleged that the Sindh government had not helped out the masses during the coronavirus emergency, as Sindh was the first province to impose a lockdown to curb the spread of the lethal infectious disease.
He said the federal government had not accepted the suggestion of Sindh to use the data of Benazir Income Support Programme to dispense aid during the lockdown. He deplored that needy people were made to stand in long queues, and the unsafe method so adopted alarmingly spread the coronavirus in the country.
Read more: Inflation skyrockets to 12.3pc in December: PBS
