The National Assembly of Tanzania on Wednesday elected the director-general of the country's investment center to be its new speaker.

Samuel Sitta, just elected to the 324-seat new parliament through the 2005 general elections held on Dec. 14, has been serving as the investment director before joining the parliamentary race at Urambo East in the region of Tabora in west Tanzania on the ticket of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party.

Of the six aspirants for the position of speaker from the ruling party, two stood outstanding out of a pre-election scrutiny by the party.

Sitta won the ensuing house election by garnering more votes than the hitherto speaker, Pius Msekwa, who served in the previous house between 2000 and 2005.

The ruling party has won the lion's share of the 232 constituent seats in the general elections. The party got 206 elected seats while the National Electoral Commission allotted an addition of 58 special seats for women to Chama Cha Mapinduzi.

The Civic United Front, the major opposition party in the country, got 19 constituent seats apart from 11 allotted special seats for women.

The Tanzanian parliament is consisted mainly of three types of seats -- the elected constituent seats, the allotted special seats for women and the nominated seats by the president of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Of the 324 seats for the newly-formed parliament, the ruling party so far has got 264 seats while the Civic United Front has got 30 seats.

The Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo party got 11 seats and the Tanzania Labor Party and the United Democratic Party each got one seat.

Source: Xinhua