ISLAMABAD: The opposition in the National Assem­bly is sharpening its knives for a showdown today (Thurs­day), as Presi­dent Mamnoon Hussain prepares to address a joint session of parliament to mark the beginning of the ruling party’s final year in government.

With their main bone of contention — the government’s refusal to broadcast the opposition’s budget speeches live on PTV — still unresolved, opposition parties on Wednesday assembled outside Parliament House and convened their own, parallel budget session.

Inside the house, however, things remained tense; treasury lawmakers continued their speeches amid a low turnout, and the session was hurriedly adjourned for a second consecutive day after the Pakistan Peoples Party’s Aijaz Jhakrani stormed out of the opposition lobby to point out a lack of quorum.

When the National Assem­bly convened on Wednesday morning, the opposition benches were completely deserted. Outside the building, however, seats had been laid out for lawmakers, gathered under the awning normally reserved for press conferences.

With the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s Kishwer Zehra presiding, leaders from the main opposition parties gave the budget speeches they had prepared to deliver on the house floor, in full view of the private media’s cameras.

The highlight of the day was a comprehensive speech from Leader of the Opposition Syed Khursheed Shah, who had come armed with a stack of documents and reference books.

Deploring the government’s refusal to air opposition leaders’ speeches on state-run media, Mr Shah said they had convened an “awami assembly” to highlight the problems of common people.

Budget speeches delivered outside Parliament House

He tore into the government’s tall claims, criticising the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government for, among other things: missing the GDP growth target, artificially lowering the budget deficit, undoing PPP-era progress by falling behind on the growth rate, being non-serious about water issues and climate change, and not prioritising poverty alleviation.

PM compared to Nero

Likening Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to the Roman emperor Nero — who famously played the fiddle as Rome burned around him — Mr Shah listed several projects in Sindh, Balochis­tan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan that had been allocated “zero funding” in the current budget.

The opposition leader also took the government to task for failing to impose an “education emergency” as promised, not calling meetings of the Council of Common Interests and deliberately starving Karachi of electricity.

Brandishing a letter, he asked how the government could claim to have given Rs341 billion to farmers in the Kissan Package, when in a letter to the International Monetary Fund dated March 10, 2016, it was stated that the actual figure was closer to Rs30bn.

During Mr Shah’s speech, Pakhutunkhwa Milli Awami Party leader Mehmood Achak­zai came to the opposition’s stage, ostensibly to invite Mr Shah for a dialogue.

In a brief but hard-hitting speech, Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf financial whiz Asad Umar questioned the authenticity of Finance Minister Ishaq Dar’s statistics, asking how industrial production could have increased in a year that saw a sharp decline in the amount of power supplied to it. He also flayed the decline in revenue from direct taxes, saying while the government was happy to burden the poor and middle class, the rich were getting off scot-free.

While appreciating Rs200bn increase in development expenditure, Mr Umar claimed that nearly Rs242bn of the Public Sector Development Programme was allocated to the prime minister’s discretionary projects. When the lawmakers in attendance expressed their displeasure, he demanded that approval for all such schemes must be taken from parliament.

Attempts by ministers to win over the opposition also seemed to be in vain as, after the budget speeches, parliamentary leaders met to discuss their protest strategy for Thursday’s joint sitting of parliament. “We will not allow the president to say even a single word,” a statement released after the meeting quoted Mr Shah as saying.

Opposition leaders will meet again this morning, ahead of the president’s address, to finalise their plan of action and, by all accounts, they are in no mood to let the address go smoothly.

A source in the Presidency, however, told Dawn that President Mamnoon Hussain was well-prepared to face “any untoward situation during the joint session” and he would continue his speech, even if opposition members tried to disrupt it. “The president is a head of the state and he should not be targeted for political point-scoring,” the source said.

Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2017