Very ‘good’ gift by ‘imported’ govt

Prof. Rahmat Karim Baig

The half parliament has been busily increasing the prices of petroleum products at the command of IMF which is a US tool to entrap ‘banana republics’. This is a snipe on the poor inhabitants of the poor country.

Those who had pushed the economy of the country in the last 40 years into deep pits from which nothing could be retrieved, now come to tell us that they are utterly innocent in this matter as if we were not present in this country and had no eyes to see or ears to listen, what a pity! And that all the loans were taken by the PTI government during the last three years? The highest price of petroleum is the invaluable ‘gift’ of the PDM government.

The country has been ruled by the Sharif brothers when they began to shine the shoes of Ziaul Haq –  the worst dictator of the country. The other dictators who preceded or succeeded him did not cause as much damage to the country. Zia ‘used to narrate the ‘verses of the Holy Quran’ to validate his integrity but was driven by the CIA into the Afghan war.

He believed the CIA and the US bosses never had the idea that they could throw him away as a used chewing gum. He and those who were in his team were paradoxically in a state of trauma and did not have the sense that the CIA had always used people like him around the world and then disposed them of.

The dictator who preceded him was General Ayub Khan who ruled for over 10 years and established a number of industries and constructed dams to generate power but he also depended on the CIA and was miled by them ignoring the then USSR and Afghanistan as enemies, but it did him no good. His policies or the policies of his predecessors in the 1950s were pro-US with defense pacts called SEATO and SENTO in which Pakistan received the deadliest blows.

The next dictator who came to power by ousting Nawaz Sharif was Pervez Musharraf who did some work in the field of telecommunication but also ignored construction of water reservoirs for generation of electricity. The loans of his time and that of his predecessors such as Benazir Bhutto’s ill-conceived energy policies to generate energy from oil was highly stupid planning.

This IPP curse landed the economy into the mire from where we cannot come out and have to go to IMF to pay the mark-up of the loans within prescribed time. Musharaf is coming back but bed-ridden. Alas! What a pity! He was very kind to Chitralis and we must pray for his recovery.