PESHAWAR: Pakistan Peoples Party leaders have expressed concerns over the increasing prices of daily use items.

Speaking at a workers meeting here on Monday, PPP parliamentary leader in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly Sher Azam Wazir, Peshawar division president Liaquat Shabab and others said during its first 100 days the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government could not provide any relief to the people.

They said the government won’t be able to resolve the core issues pertaining to unemployment, price hike, lawlessness and weak national economy.

Mr Wazir said the government was unable to devise an effective strategy to control price hike and joblessness and the ministers were attempting to hide their weaknesses by issuing statements to media just to dodge the citizens.

The PPP parliamentary leader said the level of governance of any government could be judged from its economic policy, but the rulers were yet to prove their capability in that regard.

Increasing prices of petroleum products, power, natural gas, he said had broken backbone of the poor during the government’s first 100 days. He claimed that the credit went to former PPP government for giving jobs to thousands of people, providing smooth power supply to the consumers and maintaining prices of daily use commodities within the reach of daily wagers.

Liaquat Shabab said by increasing oil prices, power and natural gas rates the government had collected billions of rupees to run the routine affairs. He said Prime Minister Imran Khan had started collecting donations to run the country. He said no good could be expected from the PTI leadership as most of the ministers had also served under former dictators Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf.

The PPP leader said Imran Khan’s talk of turning Pakistan into a welfare state was just to hoodwink the people, adding the rulers were bound to materialise their election manifesto.

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2018