At the beginning of June, Sher Afzal Marwat was given the floor in the lower house of parliament. The address he made was unusual from the many other speeches he has given in parliament. With his leader imprisoned,and his party in shambles, Mr Marwat was speaking on this occasion not as a PTI parliamentarian but as a constituency politician.
The normally fiery lawyer turned politician spoke with relative calmness as he made a case for the people of Lakki Marwat. Outside the parliament house, a small group of people from the KP District were sitting in protest. The subject of their ire, and of Mr Marwat’s speech, was the Lucky Conglomerate.
Since 1993, the Lucky Group has been operating a massive factory in Darra Pezu in Lakki Marwat, which is one of the largest cement manufacturing facilities in the entire country. Sher Afzal Marwat’s contention was that in the past two decades, Lucky Cement had failed to give back to the district in any tangible way.
It was an interesting debate on the floor of the national assembly raising an important question: Do companies have a legal responsibility in addition to a moral one to look after their local communities? Mr Marwat and the people of his constituency, NA47 Lakki Marwat in KP, were of the opinion that there should be. But it turns out Pakistan doesn’t really have any legislation that compels companies to spend in the way of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), let alone where they should be spending any CSR budget they might have.
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