Govt. has taken steps to move away from welfare state – FM

The government has taken substantial steps to move away from a welfare state in the last 18 months, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohomed Ali Sabry said recently on a televised interview.He said that the current government has introduced cost reflective pricing for utilities.

“No one thought this could be done. We can’t keep on subsidizing State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Some SOEs are being privatized,” he said.Minister Sabry said that the IMF in the 1990s took a series of unpopular decisions. However, the IMF has changed, he said.

“The recommendations they have given us are good. They have asked us to be more efficient, less corrupt and increase the welfare dole outs to the most vulnerable,” he said.

Minister Sabry said that during his tenure as Minister of Justice he attempted to increase the number of hard drugs, like heroin, that a person needed to possess to give them a life sentence.

“Now it’s two grams. I wanted to increase it to five. People who have about a gram or two with them often are addicts. We need to rehabilitate them. What the police often do is claim a person possesses drugs over two grams and file a case at the high courts. Then the drugs are sent to the government analyst who takes six months to send the report. 99 percent of the time the government analyst says there are less than two grams here. The addicts who had been languishing in jails are then granted bail. This is a ludicrous situation. There are thousands of such cases. There is no time to listen to cases of big time drug dealers,” he said. (RK)