Saturday, December 6, 2014

Pakistan: PPP to thwart govt’s privatisation conspiracies






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Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) central additional secretary general and Senator, Raza Rabbani has announced to observe anti-privatisation day on January 1, 2015, in order to force government to stop privatisation of government institutions.

He was addressing a press conference at Bilawal House Media cell on Thursday. Senator Saeed Ghani and PPP members also present in the occasion.
He said in addition to January 1, a token strike for just one hour would also be observed soon. Workers and the labourers would attend their work places with wearing black bands around their arms. Earlier, Raza Rabbani also presided over an anti-privatisation conference in which a number of trade unionists participated and give their suggestions to stop the privatisation of OGDCL, PIA and Steel Mills. “The sale of Karachi Electric has proved that the country has suffered a lot and the damages are still being continued on the national economy,” he commented.

He said the privatization policy of the sitting government was an open scheme to sell the national strategic institutions to the foreign investors. The sale of such national strategic institutions would hurt the national integrity and it would inflict colossal and irreparable loss to the country. PPP would never allow this to happen, he added. He said the government’s thrust for selling the national strategic institutions to the private investors was a planned part of the conspiracies being hatched against the country. The federal government had announced selling the OGDCL but it compelled to delay its sale following vehement protests and opposition. He further said the plans for the sale of the OGDCL was not yet discarded but just delayed. It was a clear indication that the government was working under the dictation of the forces of imperialism.

Rabbani said the representative conference of the trade unions on the national level had decided and approved forming a committee with its members from trade unions for chalking out all future programmes against the privatisation of national strategic institutions. The committee would also take decision for staging a protest sit-in in front of the parliament to record their protest against privatisation. In addition, another committee would also be constituted that would consist of trade union representatives and experts which would work on plans for running the national strategic institutions by the labourers.

Expressing grief over non-disbursement of salaries of the employees of Pakistan Steel Mills for the past three months, he demanded the federal government to take immediate steps for disbursement of employees’ salaries. Speaking on the occasion, Senator Saeed Ghani said the federal government had lied to the nation about the heightened deficit in the national strategic institutions. The claims about Rs500 billion were absolutely incorrect and were meant to deceive the nation.

He said the total amount of deficit was just Rs173 billion of which the deficit amounting to Rs91 billion was from the power distribution companies.

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