Main Address - H.E. Imran Khan - Full Session - World Government Summit 2019

that in the muslim world also we've started summits like this where ideas are exchanged intellectual activities promoted so i want to congratulate you first of all and then before i start my vision of governance in pakistan i just want to inform the audience here what what was a international sportsman a cricketer how did he end up in politics and then how did he become a prime minister so i think it'll be interesting for you because then you will understand what i intend to do with pakistan you see i grew up in pakistan i am the first generation of pakistanis when pakistan in the 60s was considered the fastest growing country in asia it was actually a model of development for the developing world i just met sheikh mohammed today and he again reminded me that emirates airline was helped by pakistan airlines in in the 70s so pakistan was a country with optimism hope we grew rapidly we had excellent governance system our bureaucracy was one of the best in asia and that's the pakistan i grew up in so then i played international cricket when i started my international cricket pakistan was one of the weakest teams in world cricket and we were emerging from colonialism so we took great pride as our team became stronger and it competed and by the time i left cricket pakistan was world champions so i took pride like my countrymen as we competed internationally and we grew in confidence but unfortunately our country could not keep up that pace countries have life over countries and cycles it's never in a straight line you go up you go down it's course correction countries come up some some countries don't go up so in pakistan's case we were going up and then various things happened when we started our down cycle so when i left cricket i built started building the first cancer hospital in pakistan reason was because my mother died of cancer and it's then i realized there was no cancer hospital in the whole country and then it occurred to me that people like me who were well off i could afford to take my mother for treatment abroad but what happened to the common man cancer is one of the most expensive treatments so i started this movement really i went into the public to collect money to build this hospital and it's so i'm just explaining to you how i got into politics so one was cricket watching our country go up as a cricketing nation the pride that we could compete internationally and become world champions second was this cancer hospital when i went to the public to collect money i realized that we our people are very generous and strong poorest of the poor people supported me and i did what no one ever thought would happen is that from public i eventually collected money and built the hospital and not just that i built it it's it's a cancer hospital where 80 percent of patients get free treatment cancer treatment is one of the most expensive treatments so then first i built it and then to run the hospital i again went to the people and so it is the only private cancer hospital in the world which treats 80 people free because it's the people who donate to the hospital they built it they run it so i kept thinking why is it that people are so generous to build a hospital and run it but why don't they pay taxes we were a country and then i discovered we're a country which is amongst the top five countries in giving charitable donations but at the same time we are right at the bottom and giving taxes and the reason was that people did not trust the government they thought that their taxes were wasted by the government it was spent on the lavish lifestyle of the ruling elite so why would people pay taxes and of course then the levels of corruption because corruption is basically stealing taxpayers money but there was a third reason why i ended up in politics and that was i watched first of all i used to play professional cricket in england so half my year was in in england and then half in pakistan and i saw how a developed country how the institutions worked why they went ahead how they how the governments were accountable how there was meritocracy and above all how there was human development the money spent on human beings so i could compare what was going on in in western countries and then i could see what was happening in our own country but then i also saw other countries develop and one of them was uae i was i used to play cricket in uae from 1980 onwards and i saw uae kept kept developing and then afterwards we saw china develop so the common thing in all countries that have gone ahead is governance and governance has two aspects one is a government a government has to be accountable the more accountable a government the more cleaner government the more successful it is and secondly again i repeat is meritocracy the better the system of getting the best talent to the top the better the country let me just give you a sporting example australia is the most successful [Music] cricketing country in cricket history of to over 200 years because australia has the best system of bringing its talent up pakistan in my opinion and i'm not prejudiced i understand cricket better than probably everyone in this in this hall pakistan has the greatest talent of all the countries i've played i've never seen as much talent as in pakistan but we do not have a system of bringing that talent up so what's the point of having great talent if you do not have a system of meritocracy which brings the talent up and that's in every field in the 60s the reason pakistan went up because our civil service exam was the toughest it was the most all the young people wanted to go into pakistan civil service it was the toughest exam we had the best talent that came up and in 60s the reason we progressed one of the main reasons was a civil service of very high quality and gradually as a system of merit went down so did the country so i wanted to so i wanted pakistan to go up and i as i said i saw uae going up the way each each year you came it changed it got better and better and similarly and of course the greatest example is china for me the the thing about china which is just remarkable no nation in the history of mankind has done what china has achieved in 30 years they have brought 700 million uh people out of poverty it is just a phenomena which has never happened in human history and of course my motivation again of of the pakistan i wanted to see was based and i am a student of history islamic history especially was on the prophet of prophet peace be upon him the state of madina which he created now why do i say the state of madina because the state of madina laid the foundation of one of the greatest civilization in the history of mankind the principles that were that that were that found the the foundation of the state of madina is what for the next 700 years was the greatest civilization on earth and what were those principles the state of madina was founded on incredible principles of justice and humanity it was the first time a welfare state was made a a state that took responsibility of the weak what china has done right now that was the state of madina where first time a state took responsible for its poor its weak its its orphans its widows in the state of madina the first time pensions were created old people were also it was a humane state and secondly there was justice rule of law these were the two main things and the third thing the prophet of islam peace be upon him made seeking knowledge a sacred duty the the word was that even if you have to go to china to seek knowledge you must those days going to china meant not coming back so the emphasis on seeking knowledge for the next 700 years all top scientists were muslims and that was the state of madina it laid that foundation and then the way minorities other religious people were treated the prophet signed famous the misaki medina there's still a letter in saint catherine's church which was signed with the christians that your places of worship will be till the end of time they will be protected by muslims secondly that no forcible conversions would be in islam thirdly the prophet's last sermon it is a charter of human rights it's about how human beings are equal so it was a humane state created rule of law emphasis on education that led to the growth of muslim civilization so this is in pakistan that's we want the same basis of our state the rise of what i believe the way our country will rise it will go back to those principles we must number one have rule of law everyone equal before the law state must be accountable we must have a welfare state where the state must take responsibility of its poor people half our population is on the poverty line or just above when the about 25 are below the poverty line the state must take responsibility all all uh policies of the state must be like in china how do we lift the people from the bottom and what i the the the most important thing is that we must in pakistan start a reform program reforms are painful but it is essential if we have to get out of our current problems so first of all i joined politics in 96 from 96 to 2013 there was a very small party most of the time it was one step up and three steps down uh the first election i contested we were wiped out second election five years later contested we had only one seat third election we boycotted and every most of the time people made fun of me thought we would we would never make it because i'm an outsider i wasn't from the political class but one big lesson from sports which i learned you only lose when you give up so so kept learning from my mistakes kept getting up falling getting stronger eventually we formed government in one of the four promises of 2013 and it was the kp province which was devastated by war on terror it was on the border of afghanistan the tribal areas the whole fighting took place in that region the police was devastated by attacks we had 70 of industry closed and kp has reputation that they only give you one chance each government comes once it's ousted the next time so we came in a coalition government and we started our reform programs first of all we started spending money on human development health and education secondly we did first time in pakistan history no party had done before we started spending money on climate change pakistan is about eighth in in in the countries that are most um vulnerable to climate change so we we took this ambitious uh mission of planting one billion trees in five years and then we reformed the police depoliticized the police depoliticized our bureaucracy and then started uh tourism because uh kp has a lot of uh uh tourist sites it has the it is was the center of buddhist civilization so religious tourism but we have the best mountain scenery there so anyway by the end of five years we had half poverty in those five years the poverty had gone half and a a province which never gave you a second chance we came back for two-thirds majority in 2018. not only did we win there then we formed government uh in the last election we got 17 million votes which is the highest ever won by a party and so now we have our reform agenda and as i repeat reforms are painful you know when you when you take reforms when you make reforms people suffer they go through difficult times it's like a surgery when you conduct surgery for a while the patient suffers but then he improves the worst thing that can happen to a society is that you keep postponing reforms because of the fear that you will have opposition the vested interest will stand up and you don't do reform so we've started on an ambitious reform program uh that's number one we are trying to change our uh improve uh all of economic policies we have cut down trying to cut down our fiscal deficit we are trying to improve exports cut down our imports we have unfortunately had to raise bills because we came up with when we when we got into power we had massive fiscal deficit and current account deficit so so we are doing that but in my opinion uh pakistan now has a chance already we are seeing optimism investors are coming into our country we feel that this is the time that pakistan will take off the most important thing and one while talking to sheikh muhammad last time he told me something very interesting he said that you must allow businesses to make money investors must make profits and the reason is simple if people don't come into business for charity they come into business to make money so the more if they can make money more people come and invest so this is what we've done we have started working on ease of doing business making it easier for people to do business easier for the investors we have we are changing our tax laws which were very cumbersome so we have we are conducting a series of reforms um and already we have we see the signs of the country improving uh but most important pakistan has the best tourist potential uh at the moment we have hardly any tourism compared to other countries but malaysia with with just beach tourism and resorts malaysia has 22 billion dollars it makes from tourism turkey with beach and historical sites beach tourism turkey has 42 billion dollars from tourism now pakistan has probably one of the best mountain scenery anywhere in the world half the world highest peak sign pakistan pakistan has 1000 kilometers of coastline pakistan has the oldest historical monuments probably as as old as anywhere in the world we have uh indus valley civilization which is 5 000 years old we have peshawar the oldest living city in the world two and a half thousand years lahores and multan ancient cities but what we have probably more than any other hardly any other country has is religious tourism we have for muslims we have the makkah and medina of the six the sikh religion has the two holiest sites in pakistan and we have just opening those sites for six and we have opened up a visa regime first time in pakistan we have 70 countries which can come in and get visa at the airport we also have i mentioned i mentioned buddhist civilization uh the gandhara civilization which was the cradle of buddhist civilization is is in kp north of islamabad some of the ancient sites the the the biggest sleeping buddha 40 feet is is in haripur and and then we have for the sufis and mos in islam we have some of the greatest highest number of sufi shrines all over pakistan so so what we are doing is we are opening up the country we are opening up our tourism investors and i would like to finish my talk by saying uh something else which uh sheikh mohammed said shayvampad said apart from this this great thing which has stuck in my mind that a businessman must make money you see what happened in pakistan was people were making money then came 70s and we had a socialist government when the socialist government came in everything went anti the big business businesses there was nationalized and the mindset of our bureaucracy and our politicians was that somehow making money was a sin so now we are reversing the whole thing we are now asking businesses that look we will help you in making money because the more money they make the more investment will come but the only thing is the money as we create wealth that wealth will be used to live people out of poverty so we we want an equitable growth we don't want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer we i'm really against this uh neoliberal economics where you have 62 people owning as much wealth as 3 billion people on this earth i i think that the the distribution of growth should be equitable but the last thing i want to say about what sheikh muhammad i still remember it's very important that to take risks in life sheikh mohammed said that when uh 9 11 took place he immediately called up sheikh hamad in emirates airline and said buy aircrafts and engines of aircraft because everything went down no one prices of planes went down people were not flying as much this is the key in my opinion this is the difference between very successful people and people who don't take risks i have played 20 years of international cricket i saw a lot of players with a lot of talent but they never made it big because they were scared of losing they would not take risks be players with less talent but that ability to take risks chances they had they they also had bad times but eventually the ones who took more chances and risks were the ones who made it big this is the time my last word is to the investors this is the time to come to pakistan when it is just going on the upswing this is the time to invest in the country and don't miss the board thank you

Channel: World Governments Summit

Views: 6,940,137

Keywords: #WorldGovSummit, #Dubai, #UAE, #MyDubai, #Space, #ClimateChange, #Technology, #Happiness, #Youth, #AI, #ArtificialIntelligence, #دبي, #الإمارات, #الحكومات, #الإمارات_العربية_المتحدة, #القمة_العالمية_للحكومات

Id: L8246CzExEs

Length: 23min 29sec (1409 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 11 2019