Zardari to deliver 1st annual speech on April 18
ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari has summoned a joint siting of both houses of parliament on April 18 to deliver his first annual speech during his second stint as the head of the state to it.
The earlier notification of convening the joint session of the parliament on April 16 was cancelled.
The president took the decision on the demand of the lawmakers, mostly belonging to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-nawaz (PML-N), who expressed some reservations over calling of the joint siting soon ater the Eid holidays as they wanted to spend some more time in their home constituencies, officials said.
They said that the president delayed the joint siting for a couple of days on the request of the party members who met him at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, where he had addressed a public meeting in connection with the death anniversary of the party’s founding chairman Zulfikar Ali Bhuto.
This will be Zardari’s record seventh address to the joint siting of the National Assembly and Senate as during his five-year stint in the Presidency from September 2008 to 2013, he had already addressed the parliament six times.
Zardari’s sixth address on April 16, 2013, too, was a record as no other president had addressed so many joint sitings before him.
It was some abhorrence of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf for the National Assembly that gave Zardari an extra sixth chance, instead of five, to address a joint siting.
Musharraf had addressed the joint siting as president only once in 2004, in the face of strong opposition protests, and never came to the parliament again till his resignation in August 2008.
He had not called a joint siting even ater the February 2008 elections and that constitutional requirement was then fulfilled by Zardari and since then, his predecessors Mamnoon Hussain and Dr Arif Alvi continued this practice of addressing the joint siting at the beginning of each parliamentary year.
Zardari is likely to face a strong protest by the members belonging to the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-insaf (PTI), the party which has been protesting over the conviction and detention of former prime minister and its founding chairman Imran Khan and the alleged rigging in the Feb.8 general elections.