Shazia Marri says if Mumtaz Bhutto were to be loyal to the cause of Sindh, he wouldn’t have signed the 1996 National Finance Commission award.
Being a minister of the government and that too of information, Ms Marri should have known that the chief ministers are not signatories to the NFC award nor have anything to do with it. Mumtaz Bhutto as chief minister of Sindh at that time had indeed disowned it on the files and, perhaps, also publicly.
The 1996 NFC award (signed in April 1997) may not have been the best for Sindh but certainly was good enough to have remained in force for six years now after its statutory five-year term expired in 2001.
Secondly, the subsequent governments of Sindh did not receive even that much as was committed in the award nor could press the case for a new award. Hopefully Ms Marri’s government would get a better deal before its own time runs out.
If blame for the award must lie somewhere, it is on this writer who signed it on behalf of the Sindh government as its finance minister then. The other member of the commission, Sardar Nabi Bux Bhurgri, is sadly no longer in this world to share the blame. He was a great gentleman and Sindh could have found no better spokesperson.