He noted that the official investigation deliberately skipped the critical 2022 and 2024 period
Shaikh Waqas Akram said that the first phase of the civil disobedience movement is underway and it is targeting Pakistanis living abroad. PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
LAHORE:
PTI’s Central Information Secretary Sheikh Waqas Akram has alleged that another nine million people have been pushed into poverty in Punjab while the government spent Rs 11 billion. on a luxury plane.
He warned that the country’s economic freefall would continue until the public mandate is restored.
In a hard-hitting statement, Sheikh Waqas claimed that a glaring and suspicious black hole existed in the government’s data timeline.
He noted that the official study deliberately skipped the critical 2022 and 2024 periods, jumped from 2019 straight to 2025 and merged six years of data in a calculated attempt to hide the economic devastation unleashed during the first PDM period.
The PTI leader claimed that the omission was deliberate and stressed that the government hid the figures for 2022-2023 because their transparent release would have shown that under the Imran Khan-led PTI government, the economy remained stable and achieved growth of around 6% despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said this hard-earned progress was systematically dismantled by the current rulers after toppling the PTI’s well-functioning government through “a regime change conspiracy”.
He slammed the government, accusing it of orchestrating a planned humanitarian disaster through incompetence, ineptitude, short-sightedness and self-serving royal behavior which, he said, had pushed millions of Pakistani families into hunger and despair amid regressive inflation and a sharp erosion of public spending power.
Sheikh Waqas stated that the economic devastation was reflected in the government’s own recently published poverty survey. “The figures released by the Ministry of Planning are not just statistics; they are an indictment of the PDM-2 regime,” Sheikh Waqas said.
“In just a few years, this government has reversed hard-won economic progress under the Imran Khan-led PTI government.” He pointed out that the national poverty rate had increased from 21.9% in 2018-19 to 28.8% in 2024-25.
