ISLAMABAD, June 9: Opposition lawmakers questioned the government’s claims about its economic performance in the National Assembly during a general debate on the new federal budget on Friday.
Ruling coalition members rejected fudging allegation and relied on the same official statistics that the opposition doubted while blaming the government for people’s economic hardships such as dearness and unemployment.
“These statistics are false,” Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) president Qazi Hussain Ahmed said about the government claims while opening the discussion and called for setting up of an autonomous body to provide ‘more reliable’ statistics about the economy.
He said higher export figures shown in some cases were due to fake or over-invoicing and foreign exchange reserves were largely fed by higher remittances by overseas Pakistanis due to compulsions linked to the 9/11 events rather than any internal situation.
“The real question is what benefit these (claims) have done to the common people to meet the cost of necessities such as flour, pulses, meat, sugar and house rent?” he asked and said the budget speech of Minister of State for Finance Omar Ayub Khan on Monday had amounted to “rubbing salt on their wounds”.
In another major opposition speech, Shah Mahmood Qureshi of the People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPP) said the government suffered from “not only a fiscal deficit but also a trust deficit” because “nobody believes” its claims about economic growth, reduction in poverty, unemployment and inflation, and “breaking the begging bowl” for foreign loans.
He said independent experts regarded the government’s estimate of a 6.6 per cent GDP growth in 2005-06 as exaggerated, adding that the poverty reduction claim was based on a trickle-down theory and a questionable survey.
“The reality is that the rich are growing richer and the poor poorer,” he remarked and said he even doubted how the government could implement its plans to build five major dams for which it needed to allocate Rs240 billion each year while it had earmarked only Rs10 billion this year.
Mr Qureshi said he feared a high inflation rate would force the government to depreciate the rupee that would make imports costlier. He proposed cutting the prevailing 15 per cent general sales tax and encouraging the agricultural sector.
A former PPP privatisation minister, Syed Naveed Qamar, said the government’s policy should have been directed to tackle inflation, poverty, trade deficit and unemployment but it aimed at transferring poor man’s money to the pockets of rich hoarders, black marketers and importers.
He blamed food items shortage on the government’s economic policies over the past five years and said that mere sale of essential items at state-run utility stores would not be enough because rural areas and small towns had no utility stores.
MQM VIEWPOINT: Muttahida Qaumi Movement parliamentary leader Farooq Sattar, whose party is in the ruling coalition, called the budget ‘appropriate’ but said no revolutionary step had been taken to boldly tackle problems like dearness.
He made a number of proposals, including basic political and constitutional reforms to give provinces complete financial autonomy, abolition of feudalism, formation of an independent NFC and a negotiated solution of problems in Balochistan and the Waziristan.
Some of his other demands included a 50 per cent cut in taxes on petroleum products, withdrawal of the proposed 0.2 per cent tax on bank transactions, imposition of tax on all agricultural holdings, increase in allocations for education and health to five per cent of GDP each, inclusion of privatisation proceeds in the national divisible pool, abolition of sales tax on food items, and bringing to book sugar and cement cartels.
PML FIGHT-BACK: A young Pakistan Muslim League (PML) member from Punjab, Sheikh Waqas Akram, led a ruling party fight-back partly in reply to a dressing down PML-N acting parliamentary leader Nisar Ali Khan gave Mr Omar Ayub on Thursday for his ridicule of the previous PML-N and PPP governments in his budget speech on Monday.
Mr Akram provoked more protests from the opposition benches but he stood his ground with a vigorous oratory and official facts and figures in support of the budget, helped by the chair that allowed him to speak for 40 minutes.
