The partisan Accounts Committee

Khursheed Shah as PAC Chairman has condoned the illegal hiring of 11,000 party cronies into state-owned enterprises


Editorial March 06, 2015
the right thing to do for Mr Shah would be to order the Auditor General and the National Accountability Bureau to take action against those responsible for the nepotism in question. PHOTO: ONLINE

Party loyalty is an understandable sentiment, but Khursheed Shah’s actions in the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) are nothing short of making a mockery of the very notion of democratic accountability. As leader of the opposition, Mr Shah is not even pretending to uphold his fiduciary duty to the people of Pakistan as head of the country’s top watchdog for public money. In just over one week, he has condoned the illegal hiring of 11,000 party cronies into state-owned enterprises, including the unlawful hiring of more than 4,200 people in the state-owned retailer Utility Stores Corporation. He has also actively stymied attempts by the Auditor General of Pakistan to prosecute those responsible for these inductions, merely because these took place during the PPP-led Zardari Administration. In doing so, Mr Shah is threatening to damage one of the most lasting legacies of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto: the Charter of Democracy.

Mr Shah is the PAC chairman directly as the result of the Charter of Democracy signed between Ms Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. The reason for giving the PAC chairman slot to the opposition leader instead of a member of the ruling party was to introduce greater transparency and accountability in public finances, so that the people of Pakistan could begin to trust their democratic institutions. Mr Shah’s blatant abuse of that trust, however, threatens to eviscerate what little confidence the public is beginning to have in parliamentary democracy. Of course, the right thing to do for Mr Shah would be to order the Auditor General and the National Accountability Bureau to take action against those responsible for the nepotism in question. But if Mr Shah cannot get himself to do the right thing, then he should at least try the respectable course of action, which would be to recuse himself from any hearings that relate to the PPP tenure in office and focus entirely on accountability for government actions during other tenures. The PPP, for all its flaws, has played a key role in shaping some of Pakistan’s finest institutions, including the legislature. The least Mr Shah could do as a member of the PPP would be to not sully that legacy with such blatant acts of partisanship and abuse of authority.

Published in The Express Tribune, March  7th,  2015.

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COMMENTS (1)

Anarchist | 9 years ago | Reply Fruits of 'muk muka' politics. This is how most institutions of Pakistan have been destroyed.
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