The PTI government delivered some noteworthy early successes on the foreign policy front, but what was happening on the domestic front did not take long to drown out the applause. The cost of living became back breaking for the common man. He had no way out but to live with it. He knew this was directly related to loans taken during the preceding ten years, which were about five times more than the total loans taken during the sixty years before that. And he knew that these loans were directly related to plunder of national assets by three decades of the Zardari-Sharif combine. He also knew that PM Imran Khan was hostage to blackmail by the opposition, by some of those who had joined him, and by the bureaucracy, and so could not pass much needed legislation which was needed to grapple successfully with huge problems inherited by the PTI government.
But what he could not understand, and still cannot, is why there was not an iota of improvement in governance. For this no legislation was needed. This was purely an executive matter. And all it needed was for the PM to identify the very best of the human capital available to him, to deploy them in the most important slots, and fully empower and back them. And governance would have improved overnight at no extra cost.
And if the numbers required were not available among the serving, he could have tapped the reservoir of the ranks of the retired. This has always been done in crunch times. Gen Grant retired in 1854; F.M Hindenburg in 1911; MacArthur in 1937; and Rundstedt in 1938. But no sooner had the next war loomed on the horizon they were drafted in for service.
I have quoted well-known names merely to illustrate the point I am making. That this did not occur to the PM, nor to any in his cabinet at a time when the state was cripplingly short of financial capital and could have relied only on human capital to allay at least a part of the misery being suffered by the people of Pakistan, is a testament to an appalling lack of imagination. Denied good governance, the only thing left to sate the appetite of the suffering people of Pakistan is their desire to see their despoilers pay for their crimes. And might I say that it was the PM’s harangues of the last ten years or so, that have done little to moderate this appetite. Quite apart from what the common man wants, the effective working of NAB should anyhow have been among the PM’s top priorities. Pakistan cannot be turned around without the rule of law being firmly established. And this cannot come about unless the fear of breaking the law is alive among the most powerful in society. An efficiently functioning NAB is pivotal to the achievement of that purpose.
Great hopes seem vested in the formation of the 30 new NAB Courts that are being formed. These hopes need to be withdrawn, because the number of courts can only help ease the load of work. But the real problem in NAB will be found to lie in faulty investigation and prosecution. This is either because of incompetence or venality. Mostly it will be found to be incompetence furthered by venality.
Just examine the evolution of NAB. Within eleven months of its formation, Gen Musharraf ordered NAB not to inconvenience the Choudhrys of Gujrat in the Co-operatives scandal, and Gen Amjad asked to be posted out. A few months later Gen G. A. Khan [Musharraf’s most able and well-respected Chief of Staff] died, leaving his shoes to be filled by Mr Tariq Aziz, and de facto NAB was made into an instrument of harassment for those in opposition to Musharraf. Then came the time that Malik Riaz, the chief thug of our land mafia, began selecting Chairmen of NAB, to the satisfaction of both Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, each a claimant to being the Chief Bandit of the country. The degradation of NAB was completed with the appointment of Qamar Zaman Choudhary as its Chairman He dedicated himself to providing immunity to mega criminals instead of prosecuting and convicting them!
Thus, the number of new NAB courts is no answer to the problem being sought to be resolved. Often the non-thinking will revert to quantity to resolve issues that can only be put to rest by quality. And this is what the PTI government has resorted to doing.