ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) is scheduled to announce on Sunday (today) its targets and priorities for the first 100 days of the next government, if it comes to power, party’s information secretary Fawad Chaudhry told Dawn on Saturday.

The party has organised a ceremony where PTI chief Imran Khan will disclose the “priorities of his government”, should the PTI come to power. He will also announce the targets he hopes to achieve in his first 100 days as prime minister.

Interestingly, this announcement comes at a time when the party is busy preparing its election manifesto which, according to political analysts, shows that Mr Khan is, like he was before the 2013 elections, confident that he will become prime minister after the July polls.

Moreover, the cricketer-turned-politician is announcing the targets his government hopes to achieve even as the current parliament has not yet completed its term, and the Election Commission of Pakistan is yet to announce the election schedule.

Fata’s merger with KP, agriculture, environment and energy among priorities

Mr Chaudhry, however, explained that the “manifesto is a political document whereas tomorrow, we are going to announce our administrative and economic plans”. The PTI’s information secretary claimed that the party’s manifesto was being formulated and would soon be launched.

Mr Khan would announce a plan that had taken a special committee three months to draft, he said. The committee, according to him, included Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Jahangir Tareen, Asad Umar and Akif Khan. He said the Policy Unit of the party’s Election Management Cell and the Central Media Department had played a major role in preparing the plan.

He added that the PTI chief was planning to announce the steps needed for a merger of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the creation of a new province in southern Punjab.

Besides this, he said, the PTI’s future government intended to impose an “agriculture emergency” and “environmental emergency” in the country to cope with grave problems in the two sectors. Similarly, he said, the party chief would present a comprehensive programme to end the energy crisis in the country.

While addressing a public meeting in Lahore last month, Mr Khan had announced an 11-point programme to turn the country into a “new Pakistan”.

The country’s two largest parties — the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) — had mocked the programme and termed the PTI’s agenda mere rhetoric.

PPP’s Punjab general secretary Chaudhry Manzoor Ahmed had criticised Mr Khan for not including labourers and minorities in his party’s programme and termed it an “agenda of some NGOs (non-governmental organisations)”.

Expressing similar sentiments, PML-N’s information secretary and Minister for Climate Change Mushahidullah Khan had stated that the PTI chairman should have implemented the 11 points in KP first if he wanted the people to believe him.

Speaking at a news conference last month, Mr Chaudhry had predicted a one-sided contest in the upcoming elections, claiming that the ruling PML-N will soon become a “non-entity”.

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2018