Daily Times

PPP nominee Syed Owais Shah was elected on Sunday as the 18th speaker of the Sindh Assembly after bagging 111 votes in favour.

The election of the speaker and deputy speaker was held through a secret ballot under the now-former speaker Agha Siraj Durrani.

Around 147 members of the provincial legislature cast their vote today, however, nine PTI-aligned members and one lawmaker from the Jamaat-e-Islami did not participate in the polling process. The MQM-P had nominated Sofia Shah, who managed to secure 36 votes only. PPP’s Anthony Naveed was elected as deputy speaker Sindh Assembly after bagging 111 votes. MQM-P’s Rashid Khan secured 36 votes. Anthony is the first deputy speaker of the provincial legislature from a minority group. After the victory, he embraced Speaker Owais Shah.

Nine PTI-backed independent members of the Sindh Assembly also took the oath, bringing the total number of members who have taken oath to 157. JI’s member Muhammad Farooq also took the oath, while three members of the GDA were absent.

With 114 members, the PPP is the largest party in the Sindh Assembly, and MQM-P is the second-largest party with 36 seats. GDA has three members, Jamaat-e-Islami has one, and there are nine independent members.

A day earlier, several new and young faces, who had won the recent general election in Sindh, were sworn in as lawmakers of the Sindh Assembly on Saturday.

According to the notifications issued by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for the 130 elected seats, the PPPP, now the single largest party to form the government in the province, secured 84 seats from different districts of Sindh. The MQM-Pakistan has obtained 28 seats, PTI-backed candidates have won 14, and both the Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA) and Jamaat-e-Islami have secured two seats each.

Including the 38 reserved seats, consisting of 29 for women and nine for minorities, the total strength of the members in the house now stands at 168.

Many members, being first-time lawmakers with no previous parliamentary experience, took their oath in the session chaired by Speaker Agha Siraj Durrani, expressing hope to bring about change. Several come from dynastic politics with feudal backgrounds, while a few belong to the middle class.