Bilawal urges PM to restore allies' trust, claims one million flood homes

Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said on Tuesday that the party had built one million houses for flood-hit families and would take the total to two million, and asked Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to restore trust with his coalition partners rather than open a new fight with the opposition.

Speaking at a ceremony in Karachi to hand over homes to flood victims, Bilawal said the programme was the largest housing construction project in the world, and that the previous record for the most houses built belonged to the government of Nepal. Federal support and international partners were part of the effort, he said.

He said one million families had been given ownership of the land under their homes, which he described as the biggest transfer of land since 1970. The scheme fulfilled the promise of bread, cloth and shelter, he said, and ownership would give poor families economic security. The PPP had earlier given farmers ownership rights, he added.

Bilawal said the world was passing through an economic crisis and people were looking to governments for relief. Every Sindh government project was meant to ease the burden on households. Voters, he said, were not asking how governments would set them against one another but how they would be helped through the crisis, and the duty of political parties was to pull people out of it rather than spread hatred. Some politicians believed the country would develop by making the business class richer, he said, but the job of governments and parties was to relieve the public.

He thanked Shehbaz Sharif for backing the Sindh government on the housing scheme, and said the prime minister who held office before him had not released a single rupee when the floods came.

Bilawal said the country's problems required a reset of its politics. "I tell Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to restore the trust of his allies and create an atmosphere of confidence instead of starting new quarrels with the opposition," he said. "We will support the government in dealing with the economic crisis."

He challenged opponents to look for corruption in the housing programme and said he would state with certainty that there was none, asking the Sindh chief minister to request an audit by international anti-corruption watchdogs.

Opponents called the Sindh government corrupt while people said the province faced an education crisis, he said, and asked why those problems existed. He told other provinces to learn from Sindh how to serve the public.