Prime Minister Imran Khan Friday said that giving an ‘NRO’ to his opponents is an ‘easy path’ for him to take but it is the ‘path to destruction’, a private TV channel reported.
“We have to make difficult decisions and difficult decisions take us forward,” PM Imran Khan said while addressing a ceremony at NUST, Islamabad. He said the country is ‘going in the right direction’, and that giving an NRO at this moment would be the easy way out from the difficulties he faces as prime minister. “Many times in life, we have the choice of walking two different paths. We are encouraged to take the easy way out,” he said. “You wake up in the morning and you have all the dacoits gathered up against you, and [you want to] go for the easy way and compromise,” he said.
“The easy way is to forgive them all and give an NRO. Our lives will also become easy. We will do speeches in parliament and three or four years will go by. But, this is the path to destruction,” he warned, adding that the path to betterment is never easy and people therefore have to make ‘difficult decisions’ that, in the future, define them.
Earlier in his address, PM Imran noted that exports of the country have fallen, adding that no country can prosper when ‘dollars go out more’ and are ‘coming less’ in the country. He added that, due to this factor, the country has to go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the country’s ‘dollars decrease and reserves deplete’. “Reserves will fall when there is a trade gap of $40 billion, the pressure will fall on foreign exchange reserves,” he explained, adding that the same problem also causes inflation in the country.
“If we want to develop our country, more dollars should come in to the country than they go out,” he said, and shared the example of China and Turkey, which he said had prioritised exports, saying that China’s wealth increased when their exports went up.
PM Imran shared that he had heard speeches of Turkish President Recep Teyyip Erdogan when he took charge as prime minister, in which he had emphasised that increasing exports was the first priority for his country. He also shared that Pakistan’s direction has been on course in the ’60s when its exports were increasing. He added that in the ’70s, the country got confused with socialism or Islamic socialism. “The direction now needs to be corrected again and the mindset needs to be fixed. The challenge we face is that government departments need to be told that they have to go on this direction,” explained PM Imran.
Addressing the students, PM Imran urged them to recognise their potential, because if that is not done, they will end up underselling themselves. “Through my experience, the most important lesson I want to give you that will benefit you is that humans have the potential that no one else has,” said PM Imran. He added that, unfortunately, humans “limit their vision so much” that they put a cap on their own potential and put limitations on themselves.
