KARACHI: Pak Sarzameen Party (PSP) chairman Mustafa Kamal said on Tuesday that his party would not accept the recently passed Sindh Local Government Act, 2021 and demanded that the previous law of 2001 was restored immediately.

Speaking to journalists outside an accountability court, the former Karachi mayor claimed that he had spent a huge amount of government funds of Rs3,042 billion for the betterment of lives of the people during his tenure.

He questioned how many thousands of billions had been spent by successive chief ministers of the province after his tenure.

He added that the chief minister of Sindh was coming from interior areas of Sindh for the past 70 years while no citizen of Karachi had ever become chief minister of his own province.

The PSP chief said that the PPP had been claiming that Punjab and the federal governments were meting out injustices to Sindh. He said keeping this claim aside, first the PPP government must tell how much money it had received from the federal government had been spent on masses in Sindh and Karachi.

Mr Kamal said there was also a need to make amendment to the 18th amendment so that funds could be devolved to local government levels.

He said that members of the national and provincial assemblies, who are supposed to carrying out legislation, were busy in getting gutters and sewage lines fixed in Sindh.

Mr Kamal added that his party supported the sit-in staged by the Jamaat-i-Islami outside the Sindh Assembly against the enactment of the new local government law.

“We will support anyone, who will raise their voice on the issue of the local government law,” Mr Kamal said.

He called upon the masses to come out on streets on Jan 30 when a protest would be staged at Tibet Centre in Karachi.

Earlier, he appeared before Accountability Court-III judge Dr Sher Bano Karim in a case pertaining to illegal amalgamation of a commercial plot of the Bahria Town for a multi-storey building in Karachi.

Mr Kamal along with nine others has been indicted in the case.

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2022