Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s newly merged Orakzai district will lose its ability to vote in its own MNA as the Election Commission halves former FATA seats from 12 to six.

This is happening as the election commission redraws constituency boundaries ahead of the elections. The process is called delimitation. The election body has to get this work done by August 28 to be ready for the next general elections.

“More than 700,000 population is needed for one NA constituency of KP,” said ECP provincial spokesperson Sohail Ahmed while speaking to Aaj News. “Failure to reach the count will lead to the merger of one constituency with the other.”

After the merger with KP, delimitation was essential, he added.

Journalist Rafat Orakzai told Aaj News that Orakzai district’s NA-47 will be merged with Hangu district, which is in KP’s Kohat division.

“Orakzai was the last erstwhile FATA district that was established in the tribal areas in 1971 or 1972. It is a landlocked area without basic facilities of education, employment and health. Absence of these facilities and militancy have forced people to migrate to other areas,” he said, adding the district was still in shambles with destroyed homes after the security forces’ operations.

Rafat Orakzai expected that people of the district would resist the move. They had even demanded a fresh census so that the delimitation process would be “authentic”.

FATA or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas was merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018. It was made up of seven Agencies and frontier regions (eg: Orakzai, Kurram, Mohmand, North Waziristan, Khyber…) These areas were renamed districts.

At the time of FATA’s merger with KP, each NA constituency was fixed at a population of 416,380 people. But now the election commission has increased each constituency to be 782,651 people for KP. The increase in population led to a reduction in the number of tribal area NA seats from 12 to six.

Changes in the KP Assembly seats (or MPA constituencies) are also expected.