ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Information Secretary Sh Waqas Akram said Sunday despite five budgets under the present dispensation, IMF approval is now required for even routine fiscal decisions.
“However, no serious effort has been made hitherto to cut the cost of governance, reduce wasteful spending or address structural inefficiencies,” he charged in a statement issued here.
The absence of any real reform, he emphasised, stands in the way of any relief and the public has been repeatedly asked to accept eroded incomes, vanishing jobs and diminished purchasing power in the name of stability. In return, he continued, there has been received lowest growth, capital flight, falling investment and an economy steadily losing ground to its regional competitors.
Waqas Akram noted that the much publicised provincial surpluses are little more than an “accounting device”. By forcing provinces to surrender resources to improve federal optics, he contended, the budget deprives schools, hospitals and local infrastructure of funds at a time when both education and health services are under severe strain.
At the same time, he regretted that the expansion of cash transfer schemes is being presented as a gesture of compassion. “It is, in fact, an open admission that the underlying model has failed so thoroughly that large sections of the population must now be kept on permanent state support to avoid outright destitution,” he maintained.
“Pakistanis have paid with their incomes, their opportunities and, in many cases, their basic freedoms. What they have not received is a credible path to growth, productive employment or a government that places their welfare above the comfort of insiders. Statistical creativity cannot conceal the lived reality of rising poverty and deepening despair,” he underlined.
He insisted that no amount of lender approved austerity or fiscal sleight of hand can substitute for genuine political legitimacy. He added lasting recovery requires a representative government elected through free and fair elections -- one with the mandate and credibility to undertake difficult reforms in the national interest rather than to satisfy narrow interests or external conditionalities.
