Islamabad: After taking over as Prime Minister, banker-turned-politician Shaukat Aziz along with his mentor President Pervez Musharraf has launched the exercise of piecing together a new Cabinet, which will be sworn-in tomorrow (Aug 30, 2004).

Fifty-five-year-old Aziz was administered the oath of office by Musharraf yesterday (Aug 28, 2004) at the Presidential Palace in Islamabad at a simple ceremony attended by top Army officials, diplomats and the ruling alliance politicians.

Aziz, who was brought into politics and made Finance Minister by Musharraf after the 1999 military coup, has a tough task of formulating the Cabinet unlike his predecessors, Shujaat Hussain and Zafarullah Khan Jamali, as he has to accommodate the growing list of pro-Musharraf politicians in Parliament.

When Jamali was chosen by Musharraf to be the Prime Minister after the 2003 general elections, he won the vote of confidence in the 342-member National Assembly with a slim majority after the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q), which failed to win a simple majority, managed to split former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

PPP, which emerged as the second largest party with 80 seats, has now been reduced to 59 following defection of a chunk of its legislators looking for greener pastures under Musharraf.

The PML-Q also rewarded PPP defectors with top portfolios like Defence, Interior and Power and Water. The rest of the important portfolios went to other allies such as Karachi-based Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) and splinter groups like the one led by former President Farooq Leghari.

The situation, however, improved for PML-Q with some degree of political stability as Hussain, who succeeded Jamali as interim Prime Minister, secured 191 votes in the National Assembly, 20 more than the required majority and Aziz won the confidence vote yesterday with the similar number of votes.

While Hussain retained largely the Cabinet of Jamali, Aziz, looking for a longer tenure under Musharraf, want to broad-base his Cabinet with more "efficient" Ministers to implement his administrative and economic reforms.

With the support-base for Musharraf expanded to the comfortable level, reducing the dependence on the defectors, most of the previous Ministers have kept their fingers crossed over chances of retaining the portfolios or getting a birth in Aziz's ministry.

According to official indications, Aziz is expected to broadly retain Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri and Sheikh Rashid, who worked as Foreign and Information Ministers respectively in the previous Cabinet, while others are either likely to be shuffled or dropped to pave the way for new faces.