Imran’s Layyah rally speech replete with promises

PTI chief vows to make Pakistan great if voted to power

LAYYAH: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan promised on Monday to make Pakistan a great country as dreamt by its founding fathers if his party was voted to power in the general elections next year.

In a speech, which was high on promises, Khan called upon the masses to stand up against corrupt rulers and vote wisely in the next elections. He said if the PTI came to power in the next election, his agenda for the government would change the destiny of this country and the people.

“Now we will make Pakistan a great country again and this time it will leave other nations behind in progress and development,” Khan told a huge gathering in Layyah. “Green [Pakistani] passport will be the pride of every Pakistani,” he said.



He promised to make Pakistan the fastest-developing country of Asia. “Pakistan will be made so great a country that people from other parts of the world will visit here for jobs and education. The country will be taken to such a glory that we will have more tourists than Switzerland.”

Turning his guns to the prevailing system and the rulers, Khan said the state is providing education only to a small group of people. He criticised the English-medium schools, where only 800,000 children study. In Urdu-medium schools and the religious seminaries, he went on, 30 million and 2.4 million children, respectively, are enrolled, he claimed.

Giving an example of the PTI-led Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, Khan said, for the first time, 1.5 million children transferred from private schools to the government schools in the province. “This happened because we increased the quality of education at the government schools,” he said. The K-P government has appointed more than 40,000 new teachers, he added.

Similarly, Khan said, in 2013, when the PTI formed the government in K-P, there were only 3,000 doctors in the province but now the number is 9,000. “We introduced health cards, which is the insurance for your health. This means a poor man can get medicines worth half a million rupees if he fell ill,” he added.

“In K-P, we have also focused on the future problems, particularly climate change. For the first time, the government has taken responsibility of the future generations and planted 1.18 billion trees in three years.”

The PTI chief said that a PTI government after the 2018 elections would invest more in the people rather than building projects. He emphasised that once suitable human resources were available, the nation would themselves build roads and other big projects.

“We will spend money for the betterment of the people,” said Khan. “When money is invested in human resource, they can make metros, flyovers and underpasses themselves,” he added.



Criticising his political rivals, Khan said a partnership between Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Co-Chiarman Asif Zardari and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif have tripled the country’s debt burden in nine years. “Before their tenures, per capita debt was at Rs35,000 but now it is Rs120,000.”

Khan urged the masses to stand up against corrupt rulers and vote wisely in the next general elections. “Those who learn from their mistakes and rectify theme, rise again,” he said, warning: “But those who do not rectify their mistakes and do not stand up against oppressors are ruined.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misquoted 30 million figure. The error is regretted and has now been corrected.