RAWALPINDI/PESHAWAR:
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi on Thursday announced a 13-member provincial cabinet, comprising 10 ministers, two advisers, and one special assistant.
According to Express News, the cabinet members include Meena Afridi, Arshad Ayub Khan, Amjad Ali, Aftab Alam Khan, Fazal Shakoor Khan, Khaliqur Rehman, Riaz Khan, Syed Fakhar Jehan, and Aqibullah Khan.
Muzzammil Aslam and Taj Muhammad have been appointed as advisers to the chief minister, while Shafi Jan will serve as the special assistant to the chief minister.
The summary of the new cabinet members has been received by the Governor’s House, where Governor Faisal Karim Kundi signed the document.
The oath-taking ceremony is scheduled to take place at 3pm on Friday (today) at the Governor’s House.
Earlier in the day, Afridi said he was not permitted to meet PTI founding chairman and incarcerated former prime minister Imran Khan after police stopped him at the Dahgal checkpoint on Adiala Road and prevented him from proceeding until the allotted meeting time had expired.
“Once again court orders were not respected. The Constitution and the law are being trampled,” he said during a media talks, adding that his party would hold a meeting to decide the next course of action.
The chief minister criticised the federal government’s handling of security and national policy, asking why terrorists had been allowed to “regroup in Pakistan”.
“Every person in K-P asks why terrorists have been re-established here,” he said, and urged that the province be included in national security policy discussions. “If we are included in the national policy, we will respect the security forces and the federal government,” Afridi said.
The K-P chief minister said he had received instructions from the party founder on cabinet formation and that an initial 10 members would be named to the provincial cabinet.
He lamented that they were not allowed to meet the party founder. “We wrote to Punjab and the federal government. The court granted permission on our petition, yet we were denied access through constitutional and legal means,” he said.
On governance issues, Afridi criticised the federal institutions and policies. He accused the auditor general’s o¬ffice of involvement in a mega corruption scandal, called for urgent recruitment of teachers and lecturers to address shortages, and questioned why the federal government had not convened National Finance Commission meeting despite pressing problems in the province. “K-P is being deprived of its rights and its share in development,” he said.
Afridi said K-P had been denied of its due rights.
“If soldiers are dying, they are also sons of the nation, we grieve for them. If civilians are dying because of wrong policies, we grieve for them as well,” he said, warning against “closed-room decisions”.
The K-P chief minister explained that by “closed-room decisions” he meant that matters should not be decided two or three persons. “How can a policy be made without the chief minister of a province? he asked.
Afridi criticised what he called inconsistent approaches to counterterror operations, describing K-P as “not a laboratory” for experimental policies and warning that the province’s people were not “sheep or insects” to be treated as test subjects.
