On Wednesday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif painted a bleak image of the nation’s economy and expressed concern that friendly countries had begun to view Pakistan as a nation constantly pleading for aid.
The prime minister regretted while addressing the lawyers’ convention, “Today, when we go to any friendly country or make a phone call, they think that we have come [to them] to grovel for money.”
Before the floods, the nation’s economy was already in a “difficult situation,” according to PM Sharif, making things even more “complex.” The coalition administration, he claimed, had worked hard to prevent Pakistan from going into “economic default” when he came into power in April and had “to some extent stabilized the economic turmoil.”
The premier acknowledged that inflation was “at its peak” and implied that the previous Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) administration was to blame for this occurrence. He said that the previous administration had broken the terms of the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which had forced the incumbent government to accept stringent requirements. If the agreed-upon requirements were not satisfied, the IMF had even threatened to withdraw its program, he continued.
