DERA GHAZI KHAN: President of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif said on Saturday that parliament, judiciary and the Pakistan Army should work jointly for the betterment of the nation.

Speaking at a PML-N rally at Choti Zareen, the seat of the chief of the Leghari tribe, he said: “All institutions are respectable and I appeal to the judiciary, Pakistan Army and parliament to jointly work to meet the challenges being faced by the country.”

The people of the country, he said, were facing a host of problems that needed to be addressed urgently. Mr Sharif said that if voted to power again the PML-N would work harder than ever before. He vowed to bring south Punjab on a par with Lahore.

The chief minister annou­nced establishment of a cadet college at Fort Munro and shifting of the headquarters of Kot Chhuta tehsil to Choti Zareen.

During its current tenure, he said, the Punjab government had completed four mass transit projects in Punjab, but the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government had yet to complete a single one.

He said that Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chief Imran Khan had promised to plant a billion saplings in Khyber Pakht­unkhwa but his project turned out to be a bogus scheme.

Turning to Mr Khan’s claims that funds had been misappropriated in Multan’s metro bus project, Mr Sharif invited the chief justice of Pakistan to take up the matter in the full bench of the court.

“I declare that I will write a letter to the chief justice asking him to constitute a full bench to probe charges levelled against me by Imran Niazi. I will quit politics if found guilty,” he said.

During his speech, the chief minister spoke some sentences in Seraiki. On the occasion, he also announced admission quota on merit at the local medical college for less privileged students from rural and tribal areas of D.G. Khan and Rajanpur.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2018