Centre, KP govt ‘agree’ over appointment of new chief secretary

PESHAWAR. The impasse over the appointment of the new chief secretary in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has finally been resolved after months of deadlock.

Sources said that Shakeel Qadir Khan, the incumbent chief secretary of Balochistan, will be appointed as the new chief secretary of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the coming days.

A notable PTI figure, sources in the KP Chief Minister’s Secretariat and the Establishment Division Islamabad, have confirmed to HUM News English that the federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments have finally agreed to appoint Shakeel Qadir Khan, a senior bureaucrat of the Pakistan Administrative Service (PAS), as the new boss of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bureaucracy, and the Establishment Division will soon issue his appointment notification.

The dispute between the federal government and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government over the appointment of a new chief secretary in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa began when the principal secretary to the KP chief minister sent a summary to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat proposing only the name of the former Additional Chief Secretary and PAS officer, Shahab Ali Shah, for the chief secretary slot.

The federal government returned the said summary to the KP government with the objection that a single name was not acceptable and that a panel of three names should be sent.

Subsequently, the provincial government sent a new panel to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat consisting of the names of PAS group’s Shahab Ali Shah, Dr Shehzad Bangash, and Munir Azam.

However, despite the passing of more than a month, the new chief secretary could not be appointed.

Upon this, the KP chief minister adopted an aggressive stance threatening that he would appoint the chief secretary from the officers of the province by invoking the 18th Amendment if the federal government did not appoint the new chief secretary as proposed by the provincial government.