LAHORE: Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Ameer Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman has announced a nationwide strike on September 3, declaring that the people of Pakistan are facing severe hardship, that the government will have to provide relief, and that the party’s movement will not now be halted.
Addressing a press conference, Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman said sit-ins are under way in Lahore, Peshawar and Karachi, and that protest camps have also been established. Sit-ins and protest camps are being set up at hundreds of locations across Punjab, he said, while a sit-in and protest camp have also begun in Hyderabad.
He announced that a historic nationwide strike would be held on September 3, for which committees have already been constituted. A major public gathering was scheduled in Faisalabad on the day of the press conference, with another to follow in Rawalpindi on August 30. The Peshawar sit-in, he said, would be converted into a public meeting on August 31.
The Jamaat-e-Islami chief said the Karachi sit-in would likewise be turned into a large public gathering. He added that the party would hold talks with the trader community and industrialists to make the nationwide strike a success. The government should understand, he said, that the movement will not stop and that relief will have to be given to the people.
Hafiz Naeem ur Rehman also directed sharp criticism at the government over electricity load shedding, saying the country’s power generation capacity has doubled, yet consumers are paying capacity payments while load shedding is at its peak.
He questioned the Prime Minister directly, asking why load shedding is taking place in Pakistan and why power companies are not functional despite thousands of billions of rupees being extracted from consumers.
The Jamaat-e-Islami Ameer said the ruling clique and the bureaucracy pay no attention to public problems, alleging that the Pakistan Peoples Party, the PML-N and the MQM have thrown the system into disarray. He demanded an end to electricity load shedding and the removal of additional burdens imposed on the public, including the petroleum levy.
The capacity payment issue he raised has been at the centre of national energy debate for several years. Under long-standing power purchase agreements, independent power producers are paid for the capacity they make available regardless of how much electricity is actually dispatched. As installed capacity has grown faster than reliable demand, the fixed component of the electricity bill has expanded, which is why consumers face rising tariffs even during periods when supply is curtailed.
The petroleum levy, the party’s other core demand, is a per-litre charge applied to fuel that is retained by the federal government. Because it is collected outside the divisible pool shared with the provinces, it has become a significant revenue instrument — and, for the same reason, a difficult one to reduce without an alternative source of collection.
Jamaat-e-Islami has historically drawn much of its organisational strength from urban trading communities and salaried professionals, constituencies most exposed to utility costs and fuel-linked inflation. Its outreach to traders and industrialists ahead of September 3 reflects the practical reality that the success of any strike call depends on shutters staying down in the country’s commercial markets.
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