KARACHI - Exactly 27 hours before completion of its five-year constitutional term, the Sindh Assembly was dissolved on Friday after Governor Muhammad Kamran Khan Tessori signed a summary presented by Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah who himself reached the Governor’s House after attending the very last sitting of the provincial assembly’s 15th session. A notification has also been issued which read, “As advised by the Chief Minister and in exercise of the powers conferred upon me under clause (1) of Article-112 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973, and other provisions enabling me in this behalf I, Muhammad Kamran Khan Tessori, Governor of Sindh, hereby dissolve the Provincial Assembly of Sindh on Friday the 11th day of August, 2023 at 9:00 pm.”
The constitutional five-year term was completing on August 12 as the first session of the Sindh Assembly was held on 13th August 2018 with new elected members taking oath following general elections.
Earlier addressing a farewell sitting, Murad also apologised the lawmakers for dissolving the assembly one day before completion of its five-year tenure. He said that record legislation and works had been done during the five years by the assembly despite the fact that many hindrances were created for it by the PTI’s federal government.
“The main example of hurdles (for Sindh) Assembly is the arrest of Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani who still comes from jail to run the assembly,” he added. He said that several PPP members and bureaucrats were implicated in ‘false and fabricated’ cases just to destabilize Sindh province. “Federation and the other three provinces became unstable, but the Sindh province remained stable,” the CM said.
The CM said that during the last five years they had to tackle three calamities including Covid-19, floods 2022 and ‘Imran Khan’. He said that then PTI-led federal government was not willing to go for shutdown in the wake of Covid-19 but it was the PPP that insisted for lockdown and eventually Pakistan was not affected as badly as other countries.
Murad said floods in 2022 wreaked havoc as around 13 million people had been affected while 2.1 million houses were partly or completely destroyed. He added that crops on more than three acres of land and around 20,000 schools were damaged. He said that the government was establishing around 2.1 million houses with the support of federal government, World Bank and Islamic Bank. Murad added 110 small dams had been established in Sindh, while the record work in the transport sector was done.