Every government exaggerates. What sets Punjab’s apart is that the evidence against its biggest claims sits in its own documents and in the records of the institutions it cites. Take the past three weeks of Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz’s speeches and check them against the paperwork. The gap is hard to miss.
Start with the award that has been celebrated across the province. On October 5 in Muscat, UN-Habitat presented its Scroll of Honour, and the chief minister travelled to Oman to collect it. Now open UN-Habitat’s own press release. Five awards were given this year. The Tunisian award went to an individual, Abdelmalek Ghannem. The London award went to a person, Mayor Sadiq Khan. And Pakistan’s? It went to the Punjab Housing and Town Planning Agency, for its Apni Chhat Apna Ghar programme.
When a United Nations body wants to honour a person, it writes that person’s name. In Punjab’s slot it wrote the name of a department. The Apni Chhat Apna Ghar scheme is real, and the families who received interest-free loans deserve the credit. But the award belongs to a public institution and the people it served, not to any chief minister personally. That has not stopped headlines declaring that the “Punjab CM wins” the award, or the chief minister herself telling Sindh’s officers that her services had been recognised around the world.
The second claim. Addressing visiting Sindh officers in Lahore on October 17, she said crime in Punjab had fallen by 70% since the Crime Control Department was created. It is a figure she has repeated since September. Neither then nor now has the government said which crimes it means, over what period or according to whose data.
The figures that are public tell a different story. In 2024, according to the Sustainable Social Development Organisation (SSDO), which compiled provincial police data, Punjab registered 4,641 rape cases, about 87% of the national total, in a province with about 53% of the population. The conviction rate in those cases was about 0.4%. In the first half of 2025, the SSDO counted more than 15,000 cases of violence against women in Punjab, roughly 85 women a day, including about nine rapes daily. Arrests in Lahore come quickly; convictions rarely do.
Most telling of all, 13 districts, including Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Sargodha and Sahiwal, did not hand over their data even after the Punjab Information Commission directed the police to do so. A government that will not release crime figures is asking us to accept a 70% fall in crime on trust. Where it does publish numbers, they are narrower: Lahore’s car thefts have fallen sharply, a real gain, but car theft is not “crime”. And the CCD’s record is itself contested, as critics of its encounters have argued.
T third claim of 45,000 kilometres roads. The chief minister says 45,000 km of roads have been built in Punjab in two and a half years. The entire network of the National Highway Authority is about 14,480 km, of which about 4,080 km is in Punjab. When Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s finance adviser, Muzzammil Aslam, asked for the routes, projects, costs and completion dates, the reply came not in figures but in insults.
In fairness, the NHA comparison is imperfect. Provinces maintain their own roads, and Punjab’s information minister, Azma Bokhari, says the provincial network is 80,000 km, of which 50,000 km has been “built” under this government. But that answer raises the question rather than settling it: how much of this is new construction, and how much is resurfacing and repair under the province’s road rehabilitation programme? A district-by-district list would end the argument. It has not been published.
The fourth claim who attacked whom. At a laptop ceremony in Sahiwal on October 16, she asked whether anyone had ever seen one province attack another province or the federation. Five days earlier, the federal government had declared an emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and imposed governor’s rule, sidelining an elected provincial government. On October 15, a joint sitting of parliament endorsed it by 214 votes to 56. If there was an attack, it was the federation on a province, and her own party voted for it. Even Punjab’s housing minister called the emergency no cause for celebration.
In the same speech she credited her father with Pakistan’s motorways and said Punjab had entered the age of artificial intelligence while Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was in the Stone Age. On the ground in Sahiwal, she laid the foundation stone of a 27 km dual carriageway to Arifwala; the Lahore–Sahiwal–Bahawalnagar motorway the region has been promised for years is still not carrying traffic. And a province where rape convictions run at 0.4% should be careful about calling anyone else backward.
The fifth claim is merit by interview appointments. The chief minister told the Sindh officers that she personally interviews candidates for key posts, reads their body language and asks “psychological, not professional” questions, and that deputy commissioners and district police officers in Punjab are never posted on recommendation.
Deputy commissioners and DPOs are approved at the chief minister’s level, so interviewing them is within her power. But the boast reveals the problem. The Police Order of 2002 was written to keep police postings in the hands of the police command and out of the politician’s office. A system in which a chief minister personally screens officers for the right body language is not a merit system. It is a patronage system with better manners.
In mid-October she declared that protecting every woman was her red line. The next day’s papers carried a different story: at the National Highway Authority, a federal body under her party’s government in Islamabad, ten female interns had raised harassment complaints, and the response was a circular reminding staff to behave. This week she gave Punjab’s police four weeks to curb crimes against women. Deadlines are welcome; published results would be better.
Each claim lacks the same two things: names and numbers. Even the one award that exists carries a department’s name, not hers. Where is the list of 45,000 km of roads? Where are the data behind the 70% fall in crime? And which rule says officers are to be chosen by the chief minister’s reading of their body language?
Three steps would end the debate. Publish a district-by-district list of roads, separating new construction from repair. Publish crime statistics, by category and by district, with the baseline year. And order every district to stop withholding data from the Information Commission. If the work has been done, all three could be done in a day.
If it has not, then what Punjab has is not a government but a continuous advertising campaign, and the public is paying the bill.
Sources: UN-Habitat press release (Oct 5, 2026), APP, The Nation, The Express Tribune, Dawn, Dunya News, Daily Pakistan and SSDO data on violence against women.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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