COP26: PPP blames PM for Pakistan’s absence

Climate Change Provincial Minister Mohammad Ismail Rahu has said that Pakistan missed a great opportunity to officially participate in an international United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, UK, mainly due to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s lack of interest.

Rahu, in a press statement issued on Thursday, lamented that neither PM Khan himself went to attend the conference nor allowed any other official delegation to represent Pakistan in an important event officially.”The Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government over the past three years, instead of doing anything to take effective measures to tackle the burning issues of climate change and its terrible impacts in the country, has only turned beautiful cities like Lahore into heaps of garbage and filth,” he said. Rahu also claimed that it was nothing but a pack of lies that PM Khan had been giving special attention to climate change despite having made tall claims.

Rahu said that the premier had miserably failed to take any corrective measures to tackle the issue seriously and was taking it for granted like most of the other core issues of the country. “You cannot stem the rot by making hollow claims through the speeches and soporific lectures on the impacts of the climate change, but such issues need the practical actions to avoid the deleterious consequences of such menaces,” he added and said that PM Khan and team members were in the habit of fibbing to speak on the real issues, he remarked.

Rahu said that the Sindh government had undertaken several revolutionary steps to fight the monster of climate change and its impacts everywhere in the country. He said that due to the unavailability of required water as per the different accords, they found it hard to revive the province’s broken and devastated coastal belt. He said that the entire belt, which had been in the worst condition, was not provided with the water as per its indent this year. As a result of that, people were facing multiple problems in the vast belt. “The coastal belt of Pakistan stretching from lower parts of Sindh to southern districts of Balochistan has been in shambles due to a number of the reasons,” he added and asked Imran Khan to pay special attention towards such issues, which were likely to affect the environment of the whole country. He said that those who believed releasing water downstream Kotri barrage was just an exercise in futility were living in fool’s paradise. “Not only thousands of the families are dependent on fishing and other activities in such district along the shores of Arabian Sea, but the terrible water shortage was also causing the devastating intrusion,” he added.

Rahu also came down hard on the high-ups of the federal government for their alleged flawed policies towards handling the people’s fundamental common issues. He said that there was great unrest among the people across the country due to a terrible rise in various essential commodities and uncontrolled inflation.

The provincial minister said that if the rulers did not desist from such stupid and unrealistic policies everywhere, people would be forced to come on the roads, and in the wake of such situations, rulers imposed on the country would not find out ways to protect themselves from the wrath of the suppressed and impoverished people.

Hanif Samoon is a senior journalist based at Thar/Badin and contributes reports from different districts of Sindh to Minute Mirror. He has won a number of awards, including the Agahi Award twice for his stories on health and child rights. He tweets @HanifSamoon1 and can be reached through email at [email protected]