KATHMANDU: CPN (UML) Chairman and former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli launched a fierce critique against the current government, accusing it of lacking constitutional direction and overseeing an unaddressed surge in young Nepalis leaving the country.

Speaking during an interactive session with federal lawmakers from UML at the party’s central headquarters, Oli described the country’s political landscape as entirely unprincipled.

He argued that while democracies possess clear legal and constitutional paths to alter leadership, the current administration was built on a foundation of murder, violence, vandalism, and arson.

Shifting his focus to the ongoing social crisis, the opposition leader heavily criticized what he described as a hypocritical silence over the exodus of Nepali youth seeking foreign employment.

Oli targeted the government’s defenders by claiming that while there was an unbearable public uproar about people migrating abroad last year, an even higher number of young people are leaving today with total silence from the state.

He added that critics are now twisting the issue by conveniently framing the mass migration as a mere exercise of the youth’s right to travel rather than an economic crisis and champion the welfare of the public.

However, official government statistics directly contradict the UML Chairman’s claims regarding the current emigration trends.

According to the latest data from the Department of Foreign Employment, the number of Nepali migrant workers leaving for foreign employment has actually decreased by 5.60%, marking a notable decline after a prolonged, multi-year surge.

The department’s records reveal that a total of 792,187 Nepalis—consisting of 697,096 men and 95,091 women—received labor permits to work across more than 100 countries in the recently concluded fiscal year 2025/2026.

This represents a drop of 47,079 individuals compared to the 839,266 workers who left in the previous fiscal year, proving that migration numbers have cooled down rather than increased as stated by the opposition leader.