Liaquat Ali Khan’s regime, not ZAB, pioneer of quota system: Ghani

Sindh Local Government Minister Saeed Ghani has made it clear that the quota system in government jobs was introduced for the first time in the regime of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, and the late Bhutto wasn’t the pioneer of the quota system in the country.

Speaking at a press conference here on Tuesday, Ghani said the quota system had been introduced for the first time in Liaquat Ali Khan’s regime to give government jobs to candidates from then East Pakistan, who generally weren’t very resourceful at that time despite belonging to the majority community in the country.

He said Pakistan’s first constitution introduced in 1956 had provision for the same quota system and that system had also been retained in the martial law regime of General Yahya Khan. He said the Constitution of 1973 introduced in the regime of late Bhutto had also retained the quota system.

The provincial minister disclosed that the issue of replacing the incumbent Sindh governor had been discussed when the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the PPP had held talks before the formation of the present federal government.

He said the PML-N’s leadership had asked the PPP to appoint its nominees as the new governor in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa while the new governor in Sindh would belong to PML-N. “The PML-N should go ahead if it wants to appoint its nominee as the new Sindh governor; otherwise, the PPP will get its nominee appointed as the provincial governor. Today, I demand that PML-N should immediately appoint its nominee as the new Sindh governor or else the next governor would belong to the Peoples Party,” he said.

Ghani said the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan shouldn’t remain under any false impression that it had secured a major victory by obtaining a stay order from the court against the new recruitment drive of the Sindh government. “The reality is that we submitted to the court on our own that these job vacancies will again be advertised to conduct the recruitment drive transparently,” he said.

The minister told media persons that the MQM had come up with the demand that the committees to be formed to oversee the Sindh government’s recruitment drives should comprise its nominees. He maintained that the law didn’t have any such provision as the officials of the relevant government departments could only supervise the hiring process to ensure meritocracy in it.

Ghani recalled that the Sindh government in the recent past had conducted a recruitment drive to fill 60,000 jobs in the Education Department purely on merit. He said that legislators and activists of the PPP hadn’t been given any preference while conducting this recruitment drive to ensure merit.