PESHAWAR: Former senior provincial minister and Jamaat-e-Islami KP North head Inayatullah Khan on Thursday said the province had been left without a guardian as both the federal and provincial governments had failed to address its growing challenges.
Speaking at a press conference at the Peshawar Press Club, he said that the coalition government in Islamabad, led by the PPP and PMLN, had sidelined Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, in power in the province for 12 years, “now operates on a single agenda: securing the release of prisoner 804.”
He said the people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were trapped between rising insecurity and inflation, while the provincial leadership has abandoned its responsibility. “It feels as if Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has no advocate left to fight its case in the federation,” he said.
Inayatullah said Pakistan was a federal state where governance must run according to constitutional principles. When the system was not operated in the spirit of the constitution, he added, crises like the current situation inevitably followed. He noted that the National Finance Commission (NFC) Award is a constitutional requirement under Article 160, yet the federal government has failed to implement it for the merged districts for seven years.
He said the seventh NFC Award announced in 2010 was never implemented, and the ninth and tenth awards also failed to materialize. Now, as the eleventh NFC Award is being finalised in Islamabad, the entire nation, especially the people of KP, is watching closely.Inayatullah recalled that in 2018, when the former FATA region was merged into KP, an additional 5.5 million people became part of the province. Despite this, he said, for seven years the province continued to receive funds under outdated population formulas. He said the federal government had pledged 100 billion rupees annually to KP for the merged districts, but only 168 billion rupees has been received thus far.
He added that terrorism destroyed 1,500 schools, 300,000 homes, mosques, shops and other properties in the merged districts, and the region was supposed to receive Rs1,300 billion for reconstruction, which never came. These figures, he said, were recently highlighted by KP’s NFC representative Musharraf Rasool in his column.Inayatullah said the PPP, PMLN and PTI were all responsible for the ongoing neglect of the province and continue to play the same role today.
