Report in Dawn, December 23rd, 2020
ISLAMABAD: While giving his assessment of government performance, Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday said never should a new government come to power without homework and without getting briefings.
“When I review my performance, we took three months only to understand [issues as] everything that we had been looking at from outside was altogether different after we came to power.
“And then, I must also share, for one and a half years we remained unable to even know the actual figures of different sectors, particularly the power sector. From one ministry at times the figures indicated we were performing very well and then sometimes some other figure showed we were not performing that well. So I am giving my assessment that never a new government should come to power without homework and without getting briefings.”
Prime Minister Khan expressed these views at a special ceremony held to sign ‘Performance Agreements of the Federal Government for the Year 2020-21’ in Islamabad.
Addressing the gathering that included federal ministers and special assistants to the prime minister, Mr Khan claimed that the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) did not get ample time to understand the issues confronting the country after the July 25 elections, as all their efforts till August 18 were aimed at arranging the required number of seats to make a coalition government.
While reviewing the preparation of his team for governance as compared to that of US President-elect Joe Biden’s, Mr Khan said after the recent US election, Biden got two and a half months to prepare himself for governance, select his team and get briefings from bureaucrats. In Pakistan, too, the system should be reviewed so that once one selects his team, then they should get “complete time” and “briefings” from each ministry before taking the oath to prepare themselves for governance, he believed.
But after completing more than half of its term, the PTI government was left with no excuse for not delivering, Mr Khan said while giving targets to all ministries, some of which did not perform, to improve performance in the remaining two and a quarter years of the five-year term.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1597328/never-come-to-power-without-homework-says-pm
