RAWALPINDI/PESHAWAR:
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi on Thursday announced a 13-member provincial cabinet comprising 10 ministers, two advisers and a 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 advisors 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 swearing-in ceremony is scheduled to take place at 3pm on Friday (today) at the Governor’s House.
Earlier in the day, Afridi said he did not have permission to meet PTI founding chairman and jailed 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 was over.
“Again, court orders were not respected. The constitution and the law are being trampled,” he said during a media briefing, adding that his party would hold a meeting to decide the next course of action.
The chief minister criticized the federal government’s handling of security and national politics and asked why terrorists had been allowed to “regroup in Pakistan”.
“Every person in KP is asking why terrorists have been re-established here,” he said, urging that the province be included in national security policy discussions. “If we are included in the national politics, we will respect the security forces and the federal government,” Afridi said.
The KP chief minister said he had received instructions from the party founder about cabinet formation and the first 10 members would be appointed to the provincial cabinet.
He regretted that they were not allowed to meet the party founder. “We wrote to Punjab and the federal government. The court allowed our petition, yet we were denied access through constitutional and legal means,” he said.
On governance issues, Afridi criticized the federal institutions and policies. He accused the Auditor General’s office of being involved 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 the National Finance Commission despite pressing issues in the province. “KP is being deprived of its rights and its share in development,” he said.
Afridi said KP had been denied his rights.
“If soldiers die, they are also sons of the nation, we mourn them. If civilians die because of wrong policies, we mourn them too,” he said, warning against “decisions in closed rooms”.
The KP Chief Minister explained that by “closed room decisions” he meant that cases should not be decided by two or three people. “How can a policy be made without a provincial chief minister? he asked.
Criticizing what he called inconsistent approaches to counter-terrorism, Afridi described KP as “not a laboratory” for experimental policies and warned that the people of the province were not “sheep or insects” to be treated as test subjects.
