Ghani predicts majority of PTI UC chairmen will not support JI’s mayoral candidate

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) announcement that it will support the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) in the election for the Karachi mayor will not help the latter as a majority of the 43 union committee (UC) chairmen of the PTI will not vote for the JI’s candidate.

Sindh Labour Minister Saeed Ghani, who is also the Karachi chapter president of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), made this claim on Sunday while speaking at a press conference.

He asserted that the PTI’s elected UC chairmen in a party meeting had made it clear that they would not support the JI in the mayoral election.

A majority of the PTI UC chairmen had decided to stay neutral in the mayoral poll, Ghani said, adding that both PTI Chairman Imran Khan and Karachi JI Emir Hafiz Naeemur Rehman were in serious disappointment.

The Karachi PPP president said Rehman should ensure that all the 86 members of his party in the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s City Council would vote for him in the mayoral election.

He went on to say that he had come to know from people in the JI that some party members had objections to Rehman’s attitude.

He claimed that the PPP and its allies would have a total of 173 members in the City Council. The PPP was just short of nine members for gaining the desired strength in the City Council for winning the mayoral poll, he added.

Ghani said he had been constantly saying since the local government elections in the city that the PPP was confident it would have its mayor elected.

He said the Sindh government did not need to detain the PTI’s UC chairmen in order to prevent them from voting in favour of the JI's candidate.

Responding to the allegation by the Karachi JI chief that the Sindh government had carried out delimitations of the constituencies to favour PPP candidates, Ghani told the media that prior to 2013, the provincial government would carry out the delimitations, but afterwards, when the Sindh Local Government Act 2013 was challenged in court, the judiciary authorised the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to do the delimitations.

He said the PPP's Sindh government had done the delimitations in 2013 that were declared null and void by the court. The 2015 local government elections in Sindh were held on the basis of delimitations carried out by the ECP, Ghani recalled.

Likewise, he said, the delimitations for the recent local government elections had also been carried out by the ECP.

He, however, maintained that the Sindh government as per the law had determined the total number of local councils in the province.

He said the candidate of the JI should become the mayor if they gained the confidence of a majority of the members of the City Council but if the JI’s candidate failed to secure the desired number of votes in the mayoral poll, they should respect the mandate of others.

Ghani said the JI must not accuse the PPP of illegally occupying Karachi if the latter was able to get its mayor elected.

He said the PPP’s ticket holders who had won the local government elections from Karachi belonged to the city as much as the winning candidates of other political parties.

Speaking about the PTI chairman, the labour minister said Khan had emerged as the biggest security threat to the country as he had asked his followers to attack sensitive installations, torch schools and damage places of worship in the country following his arrest.

PPP Sindh General Secretary Waqar Mehdi informed journalists that the consultation process was under way to finalise the PPP’s candidate for the Karachi mayor.

He clarified that the Sindh chief minister while addressing a press conference the other day had jokingly said the PPP’s mayoral candidate was sitting with him in the room.