March, 15 2005	Tuesday	04 Safar 1426

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PESHAWAR, March 14: The outgoing NWFP Governor, Lt.-Gen. (retd) Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, has said he plans to write his memoirs, recording his over four and a half years of stay in the top office.

Governor Iftikhar, who spent a busy morning and afternoon on what was his last day in the sprawling British-era Governor’s House, inaugurating a new extension block and lat-er attending a farewell reception given in his honour by tribesmen at Jamrud, Khyber Agency, was circumspect about his future plans.

He will attend a 9.30am meeting on Tuesday with the staff of the Governor’s House before packing up his things and leave for his native Kohat.

The man stepping into his shoes is the fun-loving Commander Khalilur Rehman, who is expected to bring some colour to the otherwise sombre atmosphere of the Governor’s House.

He will take the oath of office at 5pm. He will become the 25th governor of the NWFP and the third from Peshawar to make it to the beautiful mansion perched atop a little prairie. A man never known to mince words, Governor Iftikhar had virtually nothing to say to waiting reporters.

“No press conference and press talk today,” he said before shaking hands with and embracing well-wishers who had come to bid farewell to the man who had served them well both during his 27-month stint as the chief executive of the province and as governor in the following months.

He would tell reporters how bad were things when he took over as the chief executive of the NWFP which was surviving on borrowed money.

By the time he handed over the reigns to the MMA, he had left for them Rs8 billion in the kitty. It was precisely towards the fag end of his stint as the chief executive that Gen Iftikhar was seen moving full throttle on the development front.

As the governor of NWFP, his primary role had come down to that of looking after the seven tribal regions. Besides backwardness, they faced a potentially explosive problem — the simmering Al Qaeda issue in the post-9/11 scenario. He carried out large-scale development work in the backwater of the country and, at the same time, effectively tackled the issue of foreign militants.

However, his exit from the Governor’s House has not come as a surprise. His critics hold him responsible for the rather startling performance of the MMA in the last general elections in the NWFP, though his family friends accuse security agencies of having misled the government in the first place by giving wrong assessment.

The coming local bodies’ elections and the next national elections appear to be one of the major reasons, therefore, for bringing in a political man to deal with the MMA issue.

Things had started turning sour for Gen. Iftikhar after the March 2002 military debacle in South Waziristan. Among the three names that began to be blamed for the mess-up in Kaloosha, Political Agent, South, Mohammad Azam Khan, became the first casualty. The other two names that did the round were that of the Inspector General of Frontier Corps. Maj. Gen. Hamid, and Gen. Iftikhar.

While Mr Azam and Gen. Hamid fell one after the other, Gen Iftikhar survived the Kaloosha debacle.