Accountability: Audit last budget before deciding this year’s, demands PTI

Ali Zaidi accuses Sindh govt of misappropriating last year’s funds.

KARACHI: Last year’s budget should be audited before deciding the budget for this year, demanded Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Karachi division president Ali Zaidi on Tuesday.

Addressing a press conference at the party’s media cell, Zaidi accused the Sindh government of misappropriating the funds allocated in last year’s budget.

“I have seen the audit reports of the public sector accounts for the past five years,” he said.  Quoting numbers from the finance ministry, he said the government claimed to have spent Rs154 billion in the health sector in the past five years, Rs457 billion on education and Rs807 billion on development in Sindh. However, he questioned if anyone had seen any progress made after the allocation of such a huge budget.

Blaming the government, Zaidi said that instead of reforming the education sector, 10,000 schools in the province had been demolished. “The government says it has spent billions in the education sector and to train two million youth in different skills,” he said. “What have they been trained in?”

He also asked what happened to the Rs30 billion that were allocated for the local government in Karachi. “No water, no sewerage — where did the money go?”

He further censured the Sindh government about the progress made in setting up the power plants that were supposed to provide 2,400 megawatts of electricity by 2017.

Talking about Karachi’s water crisis, Zaidi demanded the establishment of the K-4 project and more of the same kind in the city, adding that small filtration plants should be repaired. He criticised how the reverse-osmosis (RO) plants in Thar started supplying brackish water only a week after their inauguration. “Just check how many RO plants have been set up in Thar and how many of them are functional,” he said.

Zaidi also criticised the law and order situation in the province, saying that it needed the government’s attention. “When the condition of the police in the province’s largest city is the worst, imagine the condition of the police in the rest of the province”.

Zaidi condemned the Muslim genocide in Burma and urged the Muslim world to play its role. He said that innocents were being slaughtered in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan while the Muslim community was failing to play its due role. He urged the government to raise the issue of the genocide in Burma with the United Nations.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 3^rd, 2015.