MNAs mark attendance, bunk session

Over 100 MNAs were present on paper, but headcount only found 45 in assembly hall, causing lack of quorum

ISLAMABAD: Some people would go to school and bunk classes when they were young. Most grow out of it. But some end up becoming members of the National Assembly.

Wednesday’s house proceedings illustrated this.

If the official attendance record of MNAs which the NA Secretariat maintains is accepted as correct, there were some 58 legislators who ‘bunked’ the fifth sitting of the ongoing session of the lower house of parliament.

These legislators were marked present on attendance sheets, which can be verified from the NA’s official website, but were curiously missing from house proceedings, which led to an adjournment due to lack of quorum.

The Rule of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the National Assembly provides that NA speaker can adjourn a sitting till the next working day if less than one-fourth of the members of the house are present. This means that in a 342-member house, at least 86 MNAs are required to maintain quorum and avoid an adjournment.



Although attendance record shows that some 103 MNAs were present on Wednesday, a headcount carried out as soon as the session commenced showed that only 37 MNAs were actually present in the assembly hall.

The House commenced proceedings at 11:05am with recitation from the Holy Quran and a naat. Thereafter, at 11:09am, according to the NA daily bulletin, PPP MNA Abdul Sattar Bachani drew the attention of the speaker to the lack of quorum.

The assembly staff found only 37 MNAs present in the house. The speaker announced suspension of the proceedings till completion of quorum. The suspension lasted for almost 20 minutes.

A fresh headcount at 11:30am found that only 45 members, or 13 per cent of the total strength of the house, were present.

This forced Speaker Ayaz Sadiq to adjourn the proceedings till Thursday.

The House did not conduct any business scheduled for the day, including the question-hour session. A majority of the ruling party MNAs were absent.

Shehbaz will not contest for NA-120: sources

Who marks attendance?

It is not the MNAs themselves but NA staffers who mark the daily attendance. A senior NA secretariat official said a gazetted officer oversees attendance by marking MNAs entering the assembly hall as ‘present’.

“There is no chance of error in recording attendance, or of an MP marking an absent colleague as present,” he said.

Answering a question, he said, members are marked present as soon as they enter the hall, but NA staff cannot bind them to stay there for the entire sitting. “Usually, some members leave the assembly hall within minutes of getting their attendance marked,” he said while reiterating that there was no error in their records.

Tampering claim

PTI MNA Shireen Mazari, however, called the NA Secretariat’s response ‘untrue, rubbish’ and alleged that “it is a clear-cut example of attendance record tampering at the behest of the NA speaker”.

Mazari, who attended the entire sitting, said quorum was pointed out as soon as the house commenced its proceedings. “How is it possible that 66 MNAs left the house within four minutes of initiation of proceedings?” she said.

Mazari even named some PPP and PML-N legislators who never entered the house on Wednesday but were marked present on the attendance sheet available on the NA’s website.

Later, Mazari tweeted an image of the attendance record and commented, “Absurd rigging even of the attendance in NA! NA barely had 20 people and had to be adjourned! While, this is what NA website says [showing 103 MNAs as present]. Shameful.”