EDITORIAL: Speaking at a Labour Day event in Lahore, Shehbaz Sharif while talking about challenging economic situation also briefly mentioned the major issue inflicting harm upon the economy, saying “we are striving to end corruption.”
He did not disclose though how his government planned to prevent and control pervasive corruption in high places, which leads to channelizing of resources into unproductive profit-seeking activities at the cost of national progress and prosperity.
Sharif exhorted the business community and other well-to-do people to think beyond their own families and invest in education and healthcare projects for the ‘deprived classes’ like those in developed countries. Citing the teachings of Islam, he added, it is their duty to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor; they should help.
The primary responsibility for providing such essential public services in all countries, developed or developing, lies squarely with governments of which he has been a part as PM and before that three-time chief minister of the largest population province, Punjab.
Transparency International’s latest corruption perception index ranks Pakistan at 133rd place among 180 countries. No wonder, financial wrongdoing thrives in this country. It lags behind all other South Asian countries on human development indices.
Everything from public sector education, healthcare, and living standards have suffered degradation. Past governments, elected as well as unelected, instituted schemes, ostensibly, aimed at eliminating corruption but targeted only their political opponents.
Dishonest bureaucrats have rarely been touched, whilst certain other institutions remain no-go areas. In the late eighties, the then PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz) government’s accountability bureau head can still be heard in an audio leak circulating on social media, telling a Lahore High Court judge hearing a case against former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her spouse to give them “full dose”, meaning seven-year jail sentence along with confiscation of properties, to which the former readily agreed.
The judge though had to resign after the sentence was overturned by the apex court, but the caller and his boss faced no consequences for making that egregious demand. Later, Gen Musharraf’s regime introduced the National Accountability Ordinance to penalise its detractors.
After his fall, the PPP (Pakistan People’s Party) government tried to enact a new law that failed to take off due to its patently discriminatory provisions. Nonetheless, the PPP and its successor PML-N government used the much discredited NAB law to initiate corruption cases against one another.
That deeply flawed law has since been amended, and the accountability bureau, believed to be acting at the behest of certain forces, has given a clean chit to leaders of the ruling party and its allies while initiating and pursuing cases against the main opposition party, the PTI.
True that no country has been able to completely eradicate financial corruption, also true is that it can be controlled provided the ruling elites really want to fight it. The place to start is to free the accountability watchdog from interference.
Equally, if not more important, the justice system needs to uphold the law in dealing with corruption cases without fear or favour. The present tendency to grant impunity to some undermines public trust in the system.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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