And now, Imran Khan has admitted to owning an offshore company formed way back in 1983, well before the Panama Papers’ time limit. Will this make any dent in the credibility of a leader who has professed to stand on the Bani Gali high moral ground?
It is important that the confession has come in the wake of an investigative report published in this newspaper on Friday. It was this offshore company – named Niazi Services Limited – that bought and sold Imran’s flat in London. However, we have the obligatory explanations.
On the same Friday the 13th, the Supreme Court returned the federal government’s request for the appointment of a judicial commission to investigate the Panama Papers leaks. This is how the registrar of the court put it in a response to the federal law secretary: “Formation of commission of inquiry under the Pakistan Commission of Inquiry Act 1956 (Act VI of 1956), looking to its limited scope, will result in the constitution of a toothless commission, which will serve no useful purpose, except giving [a] bad name to it”.
So, the plot thickens and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s breathlessly expected confrontation with the opposition in the National Assembly on Monday – tomorrow – may provide a turning point in what has been designated as Panamagate. Or will it be another temporising move?
Essentially, this crisis is not the leaks that have stemmed from the Panama Papers. The leaks have only served as catalyst or accelerator. Corruption as it has existed in Pakistan at the level of our political leaders is the name of the game. Otherwise, information embedded in the two instalments of the Panama Papers is less than overwhelming. We had, for instance, known all about Nawaz Sharif family’s five-star assets in London.
Personally, I suspect that the focus on big corruption has been sharpened by circumstances that have overlapped the Panama leaks. The law and order operation in Karachi has spilled into the dark underworld of corruption presided over by the high functionaries of the Sindh government. The ensuing revelations – or allegations – are very disquieting. Look at the charges that are levelled against Dr Asim Hussain.
We also had this extraordinary spectacle of the seizure of local and foreign currency in the house of the finance secretary of Balochistan in Quetta. It would be a challenge for a movie director to set the scene and show such a huge amount of even fake currency. But this was real and the television cameras made a live coverage of the raid. We saw it, in a sense, with our own eyes and it seemed so surreal.
Imagine how the ordinary citizens, living their impoverished lives, would have taken it when they have already been dazzled by fairytale accounts of how our rulers have been stealing public wealth. Asif Zardari has not been featured in the Panamagate scandal but his party’s leaders, excitedly gunning for Nawaz Sharif, have apparently the capacity to shut out some images from their minds.
It is instructive to see how the leaders of the two mainstream political parties that have been in power in the past have been discredited. In addition to what the political leaders are really guilty of, the sense of emergency that exists at the moment has the elements of a spy thriller. Some unseen hands may be pulling some strings. Meanwhile, not much attention is being paid to the cast of thousands in the Panamagate blockbuster that consists of businessmen, bureaucrats and professionals.
Be that as it may, the attack on Nawaz Sharif – not without ample justification – and the sorry decline in the fortunes, metaphorically, of the party of Asif Zardari has allowed Imran Khan to bid for power. He does have the reputation of not being personally corrupt and has the dubious distinction of not having been tried. He has a great appeal for the youth of Pakistan, irrespective of how rowdy and ill-educated it may be.
Many ironies are hiding in Imran’s cupboard. Like the two other leaders of the major parties, he is a certified billionaire and lives an affluent life. His party is totally personality oriented, which is the basis of the dynastic principle he so forcefully censures. He has a battalion of the usual suspects nurtured by the parties that he opposes. Those that have star billing in his show also include big players who are in the Panama Papers in their own right. Finally, we have this confession about the offshore company Imran had formed in London.
What, then, is happening to Pakistan when its leaders have to struggle to establish their legitimacy and integrity? It could be argued that the path to the present situation was paved by corruption. There is general agreement, globally, that corruption is “one of the greatest enemies of progress in our time”, in the words of the British Prime Minister David Cameron as he spoke at the International Anti-Corruption Summit held in London on Thursday. He also called corruption “the cancer at the heart of so many of the world’s problems”.
We know all this – and more. Our leaders have been told that the war against terror cannot be won without controlling the menace of corruption. David Cameron had made this gaffe before the summit while talking to the Queen, not knowing that the cameras were recording him. He said: “We’ve got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain … Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world”.
Perhaps Pakistan can also be classified as ‘fantastically’ corrupt. There is a sinister touch of glamour in this distinction. The cynic would tell you that Pakistanis would have to be very inventive and smart to be able to be so corrupt. Crafty and cunning they surely are. Still, the quality of human resources that we have is very poor and all our institutions suffer for lack of talent and competence.
We have lived, as a nation, with the acceptance of corruption as the price of development in a flawed system of governance. Corruption, seemingly, was the cement that held the system together. It amounted to saying that without corruption the entire structure would come tumbling down.
The opposite is true in the present state of affairs. Our system cannot sustain more corruption – the corruption that we have suffered so far has almost destroyed our society. An absence of meritocracy is one symptom of our sickness. But how can a curative process begin when we cannot even take pause to soberly reflect on this issue?
The writer is a senior journalist.
Email: ghazi_salahuddinhotmail.com