Information minister hits out at Sharifs over power production

The Sharif brothers always think on ethnic lines: Sharjeel Memon.

KARACHI: Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon countered Nawaz Sharif’s allegations by holding the Sharif brothers responsible for load shedding in the country. Earlier on, Nawaz Sharif had said that President Asif Ali  Zardari was responsible for the power crisis in the country.

On Monday at a press conference at the Sindh Secretariat, Memon retorted that the leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) claimed to be senior politicians but had no idea about the policies of their own party and the direction they took in politics. According to Memon, the confession of Ishaq Dar, a senator of the PML-N, about money laundering by the Sharif brothers, should be taken seriously by the people. “He confessed with a handwritten statement in front of a magistrate in Lahore in 2000, that the Sharif brothers used Hudaibiya Paper Mills as a cover for money laundering during their first tenure in the government.” He went on to say that the government of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) started the Thar coal project in Keti Bunder, Thatta district, to produce electricity but the government of the PML-N had abolished it because the project was in Sindh. “They are not national leaders,” he said. “They always think on ethnic lines and have a militant approach.” The whole country would have benefitted had the project had been completed, he added. The minister added that even though Shahbaz Sharif was the chief minister of Punjab, it was Hamza Sharif, the son of Shahbaz Sharif, who exercised all the powers of a de-facto chief minister.

According to the information minister, Shahbaz Sharif was angry and frustrated because he failed to maintain law and order and resolve the basic problems of the people in Punjab. “More than 13,000 people were kidnapped from the Punjab and the provincial government also failed to trace Shahbaz Taseer,” he said. “He has now started blackmailing the federal government, its institutions and ministries in order to cover up his party’s failed policies.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 4^th, 2011.