ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) MNA Sajid Nawaz Khan wore a garland of electricity bills to the National Assembly session Thursday to protest “overcharging of power consumers”.
During the session, Nawaz said he was wearing bills of Rs20 million. He added all the bills were the ones on which power consumers have been charged for more units than they used.
In response to what he called Nawaz’s accusations, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz MNA Abid Sher Ali said he would wear kundasto the assembly, using the local term for hooks used to steal power from electricity lines.
Ali, who is the state minister of power, criticised the PTI MNA’s statements, saying power theft cannot go on unabashedly. He added that bills can never be waived off and that the country was not made for electricity thieves.
The PML-N leader termed Nawaz’s protest a “drama”, to which the assembly members from PTI stood at their seats as a sign of protest.
Expressing anger over Ali's statements, PTI leader Arif Alvi said the words of “drama” and “power theft” should be expunged from the proceeding's records. To this, the deputy speaker said the word “drama” would be taken back but nothing about power theft would be.
A protest was also witnessed in Punjab Assembly on the same day.
A member of the opposition, Asif Mehmood, sat on the floor to protest the absence of officials of Punjab Environment Protection Department and provincial finance department.
Protests by assembly members in different ways besides only walking out of the sessions have been witnessed earlier.
For instance, a protest where garlands represented the issue at hand was seen earlier on June 14, 2017 when Pakistan Peoples Party MNA Shazia Marri sat down wearing a garland of fruits and vegetables.
The commotion started when then-Minister for Finance Ishaq Dar was addressing the National Assembly. Opposition party members left their seats and gathered near the speaker's dais, protesting the policies formulated under the new budget.