ISLAMABAD: The country’s two major opposition parties — the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) — on Sunday said they did not require to launch a movement to dislodge the government as “it will soon fall down on its own because of its incompetence”.

Responding to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech in Quetta in which he talked about conspiracy against his government, PML-N spokesperson Marriyum Aurangzeb said Mr Khan needed to understand that people of Pakistan were not buying his “rants of accusations and false propaganda” and they only wanted to know “why are they losing their jobs while inflation has pushed survival beyond their means”.

Ms Aurangzeb said that Mr Khan had started “whining like a sore loser while still being the prime minister”.

“Khan’s government has never really grabbed a foothold and he’s complaining about conspiracies to bring it down,” she said, adding that the prime minister “also needs to understand that the reasons for his fall were his inability, incompetence and blabber”.

Marriyum says people not buying PM’s accusations, false propaganda against political parties

Responding to Mr Khan’s threat to put the opposition leaders into jails, she said throw every politician into jails “if it helps in bringing back Rs100 billion embezzled in Peshawar Metro project and give people 10 million jobs”.

“The pace at which the national kitty has been robbed during PTI’s nine months in power is unprecedented and the national debt has shot to an insane Rs30,000 billion,” she pointed out.

“In whose pockets all this daily loan of Rs16 billion is going? Tell the people of Pakistan,” she said. The prime minister must tell the nation how his personal assets jumped from a few million to over Rs3 billion, she added.

In a separate statement, PPP vice-president Senator Sherry Rehman said the prime minister was scared of losing the government. She alleged that Mr Khan was doing character assassination of former president Asif Ali Zardari in an effort to save his falling government.

“No one needs to do anything to bring this government down. It will come down under its own weight,” Ms Rehman said.

She alleged that Mr Khan was running the National Accountability Bureau and the Federal Investigation Agency like his Shaukat Khanum Hospital. She asked the prime minister to provide evidence to courts instead of making “money laundering rants” all the time.

Ms Rehman said Imran Khan had been “exposed” before the nation in just nine months and he had now become a “laughing stock”.

Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2019