ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has used to its advantage the Nawaz Sharif government’s extended entanglement in the Panama case and “repealed” a federal law, the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) 1999.
The Sindh government thought and rightly so that at this point of time the central administration will not sharply react to its freakish action for facing a grave crisis. Its assessment turned out to be true because there has been no forceful, adverse response from the federal government to the “annulment” of the NAO by the provincial assembly.
“It is not within the powers of any provincial government to stop working of federal agencies although it is within its right to establish its own accountability commission and merge the anti-corruption department into it,” a senior official told The News.
“The pattern of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) is before us where an accountability commission has been set up but the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) continues to operate under the NAO. This provincial law clearly provides that wherever there is a conflict between it and NAO, the federal law will prevail.”
Being the constitutional representative of the Federation in Sindh and belonging to the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), provincial governor Mohammad Zubair has refused to assent the bill revoking the NAO. The Sindh government wants to implement its own accountability law.
Federal Law Minister Zahid Hamid has stated that the cancellation of the NAO by the Sindh government is illegal and a clear violation of the Constitution.
Article 143 dealing with inconsistency between federal and provincial law says that if any provision of an Act of a provincial assembly is repugnant to any provision of an Act of Parliament which Parliament is competent to enact, then the Act of Parliament, whether passed before or after the act of the provincial assembly, shall prevail, and the act of the provincial assembly shall, to the extent of the repugnancy, be void.
Article 142 says subject to the Constitution the Parliament shall have exclusive power to make laws with respect to any matter in the Federal Legislative List (FLL); the Parliament and a provincial assembly shall have power to make laws with respect to criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence; a provincial assembly shall and Parliament shall not have power to make laws with respect to any matter not enumerated in the FLL; and the Parliament shall have exclusive power to make laws with respect to all matters pertaining to such areas in the Federation as are not included in any province.
Section 4 of the NAO says the law extends to the whole of Pakistan and shall apply to all citizens and persons in Pakistan and persons who are or have been in the service of Pakistan wherever they may be, including areas which are part of Federally and Provincially Administered Tribal Areas.
There is a strong general perception that a superior court may strike down the repeal of the NAO by the Sindh assembly. However, the Sindh assembly is competent to make laws while remaining within the specified constitutional limits. For instance, it has the authority to legislate an anti-corruption law as the KP assembly had done when it had enacted its accountability law. However, the NAO had remained in operation in KP at the same time.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), PPP and other parliamentary parties have consistently failed to draft a new law to replace the NAO after holding countless meetings over the past few years. Instead of reaching consensus on the draft, the PPP had discarded the NAO for the mere reason that it was a federal law over which it has no control. It is poised to have its own law over which it will have total sway. This is the kind of accountability that it wants.
The Sindh government’s view is that the NAO was enacted after the proclamation of emergency on October 14, 1999 and was subsequently included in schedule VI of the Constitution, along with Local Government Ordinance, 2001 and Police Order, 2002. Both the police order and local government ordinance have already been rescinded. It felt that it is now high time to get rid of the NAO to revive the original position of the Constitution.
It also holds that as per the law, corruption is a provincial subject and has nothing to do with the FLL. It insists that the NAO should have been withdrawn six months after the imposition of emergency in 1999, but this never happened and the then government gave this law constitutional cover through the 17th Amendment. The Sindh government already has an independent anti-corruption administration and two parallel laws could not be imposed on the people of Sindh.
