ISLAMABAD, Dec 30: The People’s Right Movement (PRM) has condemned the privatization of Habib Bank and demanded of the government to stop sell-off of such strategic and profitable assets to the private sector.
The PRM, an umbrella of non-political social movements, in a statement here on Tuesday said that the government’s economic policies are dictated by the international lending agencies such as IMF which has been pushing long and hard for the privatization of PSO and OGDC.
The government claims that privatization of state-owned entities in poor countries like Pakistan is necessary to address major structural inefficiencies in the operation of such enterprizes or, to extricate them from perennial losses.
“Under these circumstances the privatization of PSO and OGDC would appear to be rather justified because these enterprizes are consistently-earning profits”, the PRM maintained.
The Movement said the final PRSP is more or less ready to be released by the finance ministry. The PRSP is now considered the main economic policy document by both the government and the international lending agencies.
Indeed, multilateral donors have tied concessional loans in future to the policy framework outlined in the PRSP — a new form of the conditionally approach.
The PRSP is being framed as a “country-owned” document, in contrast to policy documents in the past, which were, quite clearly seen to be conceived and written in Washington and Manila, it maintained.
“The rapid rise in poverty over the past few years is a direct consequence of the adjustment policies that define our economy and it is an intensification of the adjustment paradigm that the PRSP framework propagates,” the Movement said.
The PRM said it was imperative that clear and principled political resistance be fomented to reclaim sovereignty over our basic decision-making affairs.
The movement is committed to challenging the current policy discourse to ensure that the focus of economic policies undergoes a radical change in favour of our working people.—Sadaf Shakil