CEC meeting: Bilawal not named chairperson yet

“Officially, the PPP does not have a chairperson to preside over the meeting of the CEC,” says a CEC member.

KARACHI:

Although Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leaders have jumped the gun and have begun calling him their party’s chairperson, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is still officially their party’s patron-in-chief.

Despite consensus among the members of PPP’s central executive committee (CEC), Bilawal was not officially appointed the party’s chairperson on the sixth death anniversary of Benazir Bhutto on Friday.

“Officially, the PPP does not have a chairperson to preside over the meeting of the CEC,” one of the members of the committee told The Express Tribune.

“We were asked to attend the CEC meeting on Friday to elect a new chairperson along with making some other important decisions, but the matter has been deferred,” he added.

“Ideologically, we have accepted Bilawal as our chairperson, but a formal announcement has not been made yet,” said Makhdoom Shahabuddin, chief of the PPP’s Punjab chapter and member of the CEC. He said the election of the party’s chairperson would likely be deferred until after the local government elections. A drastic change in the party’s structure is also likely to be made at that time, he added.

Sources in the PPP said that save for four key positions – patron-in-chief, secretary general, finance secretary and information secretary – all party slots are currently vacant.

“We are currently carrying out serious consultations to fill these gaps… once the chairperson is elected, the remaining party slots will be filled as well,” a senior PPP leader told The Express Tribune.

PPP General Secretary Latif Khosa agreed there were shortcomings in the party’s structure. Referring to the Political Parties Order 2002, he said he, in his capacity as the general secretary, could appoint a chairperson through an executive order. The appointee could then be later placed before the CEC members for a vote.

“If not today, we will formally name him [Bilawal] as the chairperson soon,” Khosa said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2013.