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Take responsibility, Mr Chief Minister
Why can the Punjab chief minister not appoint a full-time health minister in his province?
JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: I find it strange that much of the media did not respond to Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s recent remarks on the medicines reaction tragedy in Lahore.
After several weeks of dilly-dallying, when he finally addressed the problem at hand, Mr Sharif started playing the blame game. To make matters worse, as he did, he had no qualms about inciting what more or less amounted to hate speech, because he said that a factory located in Karachi had supplied the contaminated medicines.
Why can the Punjab chief minister not appoint a full-time health minister in his province? It’s true that such a disaster may well hurt the PML-N’s electoral chances but that doesn’t mean that the leader of a party or a government shy away from standing up and taking responsibility for something which clearly happened under his watch.
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, February 7th, 2012.
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So if a factory in Karachi sends contaminated medicines to a hospital in Lahore, you mean to call for a separate Minister of Health? Frankly I don’t think any Minister of Health could have controlled the bad medicines made at the Karachi plant. I think the people are better off with a workaholic CM like Shahbaz Sharif who will get to the bottom of the incident and make the necessary changes better than anyone. Compare the law and order situation or the governance of Punjab to every other province. The credit goes to Shahbaz Sharif.
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@Amjad is 100% right.
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Can we justify the following:
Shahbaz accused that some people are conspiring to bring out funerals from every corner of Lahore — the capital of Punjab. He pointed out that the pharmaceutical company — Effroze Chemicals (which has been accused of supplying contaminated medicine) is located in Karachi — the capital of Sindh. In the same breath, he bluntly accused that during last summer “a most important person in Islamabad was involved in spreading of dengue virus in Lahore.”Recommend
Let’s assume that the Karachi factory owner knowingly or unknowingly supplied contaminated medicine, why did the Punjab Health Department fail to detect it? Perhaps, if Punjab had a separate health minister with a fully-qualified staff, this tragedy could have been averted. Shahbaz Sharif should not have carried the burden of eighteen ministries on his shoulders.
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Most of the local and multinational pharmaceutical companies in Pakistan are located in Karachi; does this mean all these become susceptible of supplying contaminated medicines to Punjab only because these are located in Karachi. Why to emphasize on Karachi, it could have anywhere!
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