Daily Times

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) Naya Pakistan was supposed to be about change. It was supposed to be about cleansing this country of corruption and focusing government investment on the countries citizens. The party’s previous government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) was supposed to represent a microcosm of this change, before the PTI won the federal government in the 2018 General Elections. Recent revelations, however, show that not much seems to have changed.

The PTI government in KP had been funding the Iqrah Farogh-e-Taleem Voucher Scheme since 2014. This was meant to direct millions of rupees from the public kitty to enhance the KP educational system. Since the project was launched, Rs 1,100 were spent on each student in the program every month. Recently it has come to light however, only 51,798 students out of the 93,000 students in the program were physically verified. The rest, as it turns out, were ghost students. Meaning that the money spent on them was either vanishing into thin air or ending up in someone’s pocket. This is not a very good look for a government and party that had professed that it had zero tolerance for corruption. Naya Pakistan it seems isn’t as new as we all thought it was.

Meanwhile, new rules and regulations regarding NGO project registration have had their own impact on the state of education in KP. Currently, the future of 2,700 girl students from nursery to tenth grade hangs in the balance in the Lower and Upper Dir districts because 20 community schools being run by the NGO Khwendo Kor could be shut down because of the newly-introduced regulatory rules of the Economic Affairs Division, Islamabad, under which the organisation had to get fresh non-objection certificate (NOC) and sign a Memorandum of Understanding carrying ‘harder conditions’. It seems not only has the incumbent government failed to keep its own education projects free of corruption but has also disrupted private projects aiming to help children achieve a better future.

It is now time for the PTI government to put its money where its mouth is. The senior PTI leadership must come down on those within their administration who have indulged in this malpractice just as hard as they have on members of other political parties. After all, accusing previous government officials of being thieves and dacoits has remained a centrepiece of PTI rhetoric ever since the party came into power. How will the party act now that it also finds itself accused of the very corruption that it had claimed to fight against? *

Published in Daily Times, March 22^nd 2019.