The Maldives was without an effective government on Wednesday, after the Cabinet resigned en masse amid a power struggle between President Mohammed Nasheed and the Opposition-controlled Parliament.
The 13-member Cabinet quit on Tuesday, saying the majlis, or Parliament, was blocking all its efforts to govern the Indian Ocean atoll nation and undermining the authority of the executive. Officials said Mr Nasheed, who came to power in 2008 as the Maldives’ first democratically elected leader, would hold off on re-naming a Cabinet.
“There is no point in having a new Cabinet unless the crisis in Parliament is resolved. What we now have is a political deadlock,” a senior official close to Mr Nasheed told AFP by telephone. Mr Nasheed, 43, said that the Opposition was using its parliamentary superiority to bring the process of government to a standstill, by blocking numerous policy initiatives including an ambitious privatisation programme.
“The majlis is preventing cabinet ministers from performing their legal obligations,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “Majlis members are behaving against the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.” Attorney-general Husnu Suood said it was becoming difficult to govern the archipelago of 330,000 Sunni Muslims.
Meanwhile, two Opposition politicians from the Maldives have been arrested for allegedly trying to “topple the government illegally” by paying independent legislators for their votes in Parliament, officials said on Wednesday.
Legislators Abdullah Yameen Abdul Gayoom and Quasim Ibrahim were arrested on Tuesday and are being investigated for trying to bribe legislators.
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Gilani’s degree ‘genuine’
Shafqat Ali
Islamabad
June 30: Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani escaped embarrassment as the electoral authorities on Wednesday declared his educational degree as “genuine”.
“The degree of the Prime Minister has been checked and it is genuine,” an official of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) said.
Mr Gilani had passed his Masters in Mass Communication from the University of Punjab in 70s.
The Higher Education Commission has sent the degrees of 200 members of the assemblies to concerned universities for verification.
The ECP and the HEC have established a joint cell in Punjab University for checking the degrees of the parliamentarians.
The pro-cess of checking the deg-rees will be completed wit-hin four to six weeks, HEC officials said. The scrutiny process is on amid fears that scores could be disqualified for holding fake degrees, leading to large-scale byelections.