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The
demands to dismiss cabinet members and personnel in high
offices with tainted credentials, dealing with culprits of
the recent Hajj, banking, privatisation and procurement
scams, and bringing perpetrators of the recent commodity
hoardings to justice fall under this category. Additionally,
the demand to implement the supreme courts’ verdict in the
aftermath of the National Reconciliation Ordinance being
regarded null and void also falls within this rubric.
There is a long
standing history of attempts to address corruption through
disciplinary and penalising action in Pakistan. Whilst it is
true that punitive action has its value as it sets an
example and acts as a deterrent, it has its limitations.
Political governments and decision makers,
deeply entrenched in the spirit of camaraderie are reluctant
to bring their peers to justice. With many opportunities to
abuse discretionary powers, disciplinary efforts often take
on politically-motivated overtures. Pakistan has made the
mistake of focusing on corruption through the predominant
focus on this approach for far too long. As a consequence,
other more systemically effective means of garnering a
culture of transparency in overall governance, have received
little emphasis.
More than
punitive action, the key to anti-corruption is to focus
attention on building institutions and systems that limit
opportunities of collusion, graft and arbitrage in the first
place. An important aspect of this is mechanisms of
oversight that can check discretionary powers, which create
opaqueness in interpretation and variance in application of
policies. There is potential within leveraging technology as
a barrier against abuse and pilferage.
Promoting
market harnessing means of regulation, fostering competition
to weaken economic interests and integrity-promoting
measures in the bureaucracy are other entry points. The
dividends of appropriate disclosure and freedom of
information and safeguards against conflict of interest
should additionally be brought to bear. Furthermore, one of
the most effective anti-corruption strategies has to do with
building safeguards against state capture and the legacy of
patronage; this can be attempted by upholding democratic
principles in governance so that the systemic manipulation
by vested interest groups, which has become a governance
norm in our country, can be circumvented.
Punitive
actions being recommended as part of the agenda, therefore,
need to be supplemented with a greater emphasis on
strengthening Pakistan’s key institutions in general and
accountability mechanisms in particular, and implementing
the country’s National Anti-Corruption Strategy, which seems
to have gone into hibernation after its unveiling in 2002
and several successive attempts aimed at reviving it.
The second
demand on the agenda calls for the creation of an
independent accountability commission. It is widely accepted
that impartial and depoliticised accountability bodies can
help advance the accountability/transparency agenda.
However, the past performance of commissions in Pakistan has
not been promising and nothing harvests the hope that the
case is likely to be otherwise this time round.
Commissions
tend to fall prey to capture and end up behaving quite
similar to bureaucratic structures. There are additional
issues with the proposed accountability commission. The law
under which it is supposed to be created and which has been
pending in the parliament/ministry of law for over a year,
has been criticised because of its glaring list of
exclusions and loopholes, which can enable exploitation.
Furthermore, accountability is a broader thread in
governance and is not synonymous with anti-corruption. As an
attribute, it is also relevant to the performance and
financial realms.
If mechanisms
to compel accountability existed and if disclosure and
freedom of information laws had been implemented in their
true spirit to assist with the accountability process,
perhaps Pakistan’s debt burden would not have accumulated to
this scale and its footprint on the lives of the common man
in terms of inflationary pressures and scaled back social
services would not have been this brutal. The blatant graft,
which leads to massive bleeds from the system, may not have
been so deeply entrenched crowding out the space for
resources, which can touch the lives of a common man.
The Public
Sector Development Programme would not have continued to
fund public sector enterprises and infrastructure projects
with meagre development resources at the cost of health and
education, while options to revitalise management and
privatisation for the former and private financing for the
latter existed. If accountability had been institutionalised,
the energy czars would have not prioritised quick turnover
thermal power plants over long term sustainable investments
in hydel power projects; the common man would not have to
bear the weight of massive load-shedding, which is having a
domino effect on employment and the economy. There is a long
list of illustrative examples to highlight the manner in
which lack of accountability at the decision making level
has translated into the current mayhem. So, important as the
agenda targets may be, it will take more than a commission
to set things on the right path.
The third
aspect of the agenda I would like to comment on is the call
for an independent election commission. Perhaps what the
agenda should have stressed on additionally is also to
expedite and support what is already in the pipeline. The
News on January 12 featured a seemingly non-descript but an
important news item regarding the National Database
Registration Authority’s efforts to install an electronic
voting system and a law in the pipeline to enable that.
Ideally this should be supplemented with other reforms to
make the election process more facilitative for those that
neither have the power nor the money to enter the run.
Additionally, the illiterate voter, currently beholden to
feudal interests and dynamics of ‘biradari’ will also have
to be primed to the need for making the right choice. What
Pakistan needs now is human capital in the right policy
making roles with the hope that this will set key
institutions on the pathway of recovery. The agenda demands
need to be augmented to make headway in that direction.
The writer is the founding president of the NGO think-tank,
Heartfile.
Email: sania@heartfile.org
Courtesy News |
