LAHORE: Former Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Chairman Zaka Ashraf is set to take the post once again, as the election of the PCB Chairman is going to take place, here on Tuesday (today).

PCB Election Commissioner Ahmed Shehzad Farooq Rana has announced a special meeting of the PCB Board of Governors for the election of the PCB Chairman will take place on Tuesday at 2pm at the National Cricket Academy in Lahore.

It may be noted that Ch Zaka Ashraf along with Supreme Court advocate Mustafa Ramday was among the two nominations made by the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in his capacity as the PCB’s patron-in-chief. Traditionally, the PM’s nominees have gone on to be elected to head the PCB, and so will be the case when Ch Zaka assumes charge following the board’s elections with the 10-member BoG now officially complete.

To conduct elections at the regional level and coordinate with affiliated departments in order to congregate the remaining eight members of the BoG under the PCB’s 2014 constitution was the PCB’s interim Management Committee’s mandate. The committee, which was led by Najam Sethi since being appointed in December last year, already dissolved with PCB Election Commissioner Ahmed Shehzad Farooq Rana having assumed charge as the acting chairman of the board until the elections are held.

The PCB BoG is composed of four regional representatives from Peshawar, Lahore, Karachi and Rawalpindi while officials from Sui Northern Gas Pipeline Limited (SNGPL), Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC), Wapda and Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) will represent the departments.

The nomination of Zaka by Shehbaz came after reported grievances between the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), with the latter’s demand for Zaka to be backed by Shehbaz for the PCB chairman post while the Prime Minister favoured Sethi for the position.

It may be added that Najam Sethi had tweeted that he didn’t “want to be a bone of contention between Asif Zardari and Shehbaz Sharif”, while announcing his withdrawal from the PCB chairmanship race. “Such instability and uncertainty is not good for PCB. Under the circumstances I am not a candidate for Chairmanship of PCB. Good luck to all stakeholders,” Sethi had tweeted. The Sethi-led 14-member Management Committee was formed in December to fulfil their mandate in four-month’s time, but despite being given a two-month extension in April, it could not complete the elections process.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023