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.
