Photo courtesy Government of Punjab
The new cabinet of Punjab province took oath of office on Monday night, mere hours after Lahore High Court Chief Justice Muhammad Ameer Bhatti administered oath of office to new Governor Balighur Rehman.
In the first phase, eight members—PMLN’s Rana Muhammad Iqbal, Awais Khan Leghari, Malik Mohammad Ahmad Khan, Khawaja Salman Rafique, Ataullah Tarar, Chaudhry Bilal Asghar and PPP’s Hassan Murtaza and Ali Haider Gilani—of the cabinet were administered their oath of office.
The oath-taking ceremony was attended by Chief Minister Hamza Shehbaz and other senior officials, with Chief Secretary Kamran Ali Afzal reading out the notification regarding their appointment. In a statement, the chief minister congratulated the new members of his cabinet and vowed to focus on solving the issues of the public with his government.
“We will move ahead with new hope and spirit and our first and last priority is to solve the issues of the masses,” he stressed.
The formation of the new cabinet had been pending since Hamza’s election as the chief minister on April 16. Then-governor, Omar Sarfaraz Cheema of the PTI, had refused to administer oath of office after declaring that he did not consider Hamza’s election to be constitutional. He had subsequently refused to administer oath to the cabinet, and had also refused to accept his removal from the governorship, declaring that he would continue to hold the office until President Arif Alvi notified otherwise.
The delay in formation of a cabinet had instigated various administrative and financial issues, with Hamza being unable to take key decisions. The chief minister has been the sole governing authority in the province since his election and has had few powers in the absence of a cabinet beyond routine transfers and postings within the bureaucracy.
The oath-taking of the Punjab cabinet only came about after President Alvi finally approved the appointment of Balighur Rehman as the province’s new cabinet. The president had rejected the summary for Rehman’s appointment twice already—urging the prime minister to reconsider his advice—with legal experts saying he had exhausted all legal means to block the move. According to the President’s Secretariat, the summary for Rehman’s appointment was approved on the advice of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif under Article 101(1) of the Constitution.
The new governor hails from Bahawalpur, and has previously served as federal education minister during the PMLN’s government from 2013-2018. The PTI has criticized his appointment, citing a National Accountability Bureau (NAB) investigation filed against Rehman during its tenure in 2020 on the alleged illegal allotment of 14,400 kanals of state land to 144 affectees of the Lal Sohanra National Park.