KARACHI - Sindh Assembly Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani on Thursday adjourned the session without taking up agenda due to lack of quorum.
In a rare event, the provincial assembly sitting started exactly on scheduled time at 10 am when there were hardly 10 of 167 members present in the house. Visibly furious, the Speaker said that most of the members don’t abide the timings and noted that even now the quorum is not completed,. “Now, the house adjourned to meet again on Monday, the 21st January 2019 at 2 pm,” Durrani announced before leaving the chair.
It may be noted here that Durrani has continuously been asking the members to be punctual so that the sitting could start on time. “I have to sit for hours in chamber, waiting for the members to come but they just made their habit of coming late,” he said in during the previous sitting.
Talking to media outside the assembly, leader of opposition Firdaus Shamim Naqvi said that it was the joint responsibility of treasury and opposition to make the quorum completed. “The Speaker uses to start sitting with a delay of one and a half hour but what happened today that he started exactly on time,” he asked.
Naqvi said it was very shameful for the government that the Election Commission of Pakistan suspended the membership of 42 MPAs of the Pakistan Peoples Party. He added that the ECP had given time to lawmakers for submitting the detail of their assets but ‘incompetent’ members did not file the same.
Coming down hard on the provincial government, the opposition leader was of the view that the PPP’s ministers were living luxurious lives on the tax payers’ money. “This government is being ran by thieves as there are enough evidences against the Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah for facilitating money laundering. Now its Murad’s turn and he would go to jail soon,”, he added.
The Grand Democratic Alliance’s Nusrat Sehar Abbasi said there was dishonesty behind the government’s each and every act, adding that the Speaker should run the house, if no members points out the quorum.
