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WEEKLY
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| The faux umbrage of 'corruption' |
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Mosharraf Zaidi
The 2007 Annual Report for the National Accountability Bureau is the most recent that can be found at the NAB website. On page "V" of this report, you will find a list of staff members of the NAB titled "Leadership." Not surprisingly, the philosophy of Pakistan's philosopher-warrior king at the time, Gen Pervez Musharraf, shines radiantly through the names.
Eight of the 12 names are preceded by a mighty title of an officer rank in the Pakistani military. Military men made up the vast majority of Musharraf's trusted accomplices in the business of stealing Pakistani sovereignty from the people, and mutilating its Constitution. If you ask an officer, he will tell you why this was the case. (In fact, if you know an officer, you must make it a point to ask.) He will tell you it is because the military is Pakistan's cleanest institution.
Perhaps that is true. And perhaps Pakistan's lawyers are all men of valour that stand for the rule of law, and nothing less. And perhaps Pakistan's judges are also all without equal in integrity and honesty.
Under the current corruption laws and regulations, I suppose we will never truly know. Because under the current definition, if you are a member, past or present, of the military or the judiciary, you are virtually immune from being prosecuted for corruption.
The only thieving scumbags that it is worth prosecuting in Pakistan are those enablers of military and judicial theft that work in the private sector, that are members of Pakistan's civil services, and that call themselves politicians.
Sometimes, in our land of conspiracy theories, the facts should be allowed to speak for themselves.
"From the beginning of the current military government in 1999 through March 2005, the NAB prosecuted 368 cases of high-level corruption. Of these prosecutions, 173 cases involved politicians and only 13 involved former armed forces personnel, even though serving and retired military officers head several public-sector enterprises and hold more than 1,000 positions in the civil service."
That is an excerpt from the 2006 "Countries at the Crossroads" report on Pakistan by the Washington-based Freedom House.
But, of course, since it is based in Washington DC, Freedom House may not represent a viable source. After all, like the Kerry Lugar Bill, the Starbucks on K Street, and the Washington Redskins, most things in Washington DC are part of the conspiracy to make Pakistanis seem like bad people.
But what about Pakistani politicians' own commitments?
Section B, Article 24 of the "Charter of Democracy"--that idealistic claptrap that the PPP signed in partnership with Pakistan's other opposition parties at the time--states:
"All military and judicial officers will be required to file annual assets and income declarations like parliamentarians to make them accountable to the public."
Once again, it seems abundantly clear that a massive opportunity to right a ship that was all wrong for so, so long, was wasted by the PPP's mindless negligence of its own promises.
Of course, part of the reason the government never wanted to touch corruption was because this very day was what it feared. After all, when you construct a core advisory team full of allegedly unscrupulous thieves and charlatans, you should be scared. President Asif Ali Zardari's political choices are a reflection of his own political skills. Among the Farooq Naeks, the Salman Faruqis, the Rehman Maliks, the Fauzia Wahabs, and the Husain Haqqanis, he chose a group that could help the Bhutto-Zardari enterprise flourish in terms of transactions, rents and spin, but not one that could help it politically.
This government of the people took its own legitimacy all too seriously. Perhaps it felt its legitimacy afforded it irrational and suicidal public policy. Pakistan was already teetering under the burden of the failures of eight disastrous years without democratic governance when the PPP got the chance to form a government. But it is the PPP's own failures to manage public expectations and to actually do the work governments are supposed to do, that have created the current environment.
Success on any of the major national issues would perhaps have bought this government more stability than it enjoys. But we have to wonder how much stability it deserves, after watching more than eighteen months of disastrous performance, from national security, law and order, service delivery to jobs creation, fiscal responsibility and monetary common sense.
The answer is, it deserves a lot more than it will get. The national mistrust of President Zardari and his advisory corps is not necessarily misplaced. But our impatience with democracy certainly is. This is a time for real politicians and democrats to stand up and be counted. Stupidly, almost as if on cue, the obdurate and unlearning Imran Khan calls for mid-term elections, while most wisely (no matter what feelings are bottled up in Lahore), Mian Nawaz Sharif urges more patience, and much caution.
The NRO list hullabaloo is yet more manufactured and faux umbrage. We should be clear about what the NRO represents. It represents a list of alleged thieves, swindlers and all-round scumbags that has been edited twice. Sometimes, as not enough editors will admit, the real story is in the edits.
The first edit was the selective morality edit of an illegitimate military government. Gen Pervez Musharraf may once have wanted really clean government, but he was ultimately interested in the survival of his own government; clean, dusty or downright filthy, it really did not matter. So while his National Accountability Bureau chased down bureaucrats and politicians with selective amnesia and selective zeal, it made a conscious decision not to pursue cases against members of the military, or members of the judiciary. At least on the latter account, I am sure the General came to rue his decision.
The second edit was the selective nature of the NRO itself, as it did not include every pending case against politicians, but was instead deliberately directed towards enabling the participation of the PPP and the MQM in national politics.
An NRO list worth getting worked up about would need to be littered with as many military officer prefixes as the cushiest jobs in Pakistan's public sector were littered with during the eight years of enlightened moderation and selective accountability of Gen Musharraf's rule.
But we are not about to see such a list anytime soon. Nor are we about to see any meaningful convictions or prosecutions in this country. Because it was not just the selection of targets by Gen Musharraf that was flawed. Like everything else during those dark years, the technical processing of cases was uniformly flawed. Why? Because PMA Kakul does not train young men to be prosecutors.
The NAB and Gen Musharraf's twisted integrity drive (other than the short period of time it was run by Gen Muhammad Amjad) was not just politically biased. It was technically incompetent. And none of this should surprise us. The NAB's impure intentions and its technical unfitness are only more of the same in a Pakistan whose resilience beggars belief.
The writer advises governments, donors and NGOs on public policy. He can be reached through his website www.mosharrafzaidi.com
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