RAWALPINDI: PPP Punjab’s central president Qamar Zaman Kaira announced on Tuesday that the party has decided to launch a countrywide protest campaign over the energy crisis.

He said that first, protest camps will be set up at Minar-i-Pakistan in Lahore and Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi.

He said the PPP will protest because the government has failed to resolve the issue.

Camps to be set up at Minar-i-Pakistan in Lahore, Liaquat Bagh

“In 2013, during the election campaign, Shahbaz Sharif claimed he would solve the issue in six months or the people would change his name. After four years, the crisis has not ended, so what should we call him?”

He said the PPP set up protest camps in Lahore and Rawalpindi because Shahbaz Sharif set up protest camps during the PPP’s tenure.

“In the PPP’s tenure, the courts took notice of the electricity loadshedding, but in the PML-N’s tenure nobody [has been] willing to take notice of the loadshedding,” he said.

He said the electricity tariff has doubled in the last four years, and the duration of loadshedding in the country has increased.

He added that the government and Water and Power Minister Khawaja Asif have to answer to why electricity producing companies are not being provided oil even though oil prices have fallen in the international market.

Mr Kaira demanded that the prime minister form a commission to determine who is responsible for the country’s electricity crisis.

While speaking about a wave of extremism in the country, he said government members of parliament and ministers have blamed each other for acting as patrons to terrorists and extremists.

“We are fighting with the extremist thinking in the country which brought [about] the incident of Mashal Khan’s assassination.

“PPP’s stance over such issues is loud and clear and we always condemned incidents against minorities,” he said.

He said the PPP’s politics are not power politics but a movement to bring socioeconomic change to the country, adding that nobody ended political parties because it was the right of the people to choose.

Mr Kaira added that the PML-N government raised the salaries of government employees by 37pc in the last four years, but the PPP raised the salaries of government employees by 137pc in its five-year tenure.

He said the PPP gave the provinces rights and distributed resources among them according to the law, while the PML-N government did not give rights to the provinces.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2017