A house financed by taxpayers’ money is answerable to the taxpayer, no matter how high the pedestal
KARACHI: The onslaught has begun. No sooner had the people begun to taste the bitter-sweet truth about their constitutional right to access information that the bureaucracy (read: empire) struck back with a vengeance. First, it was the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government, which not only exposed the chink in its armour by surreptitiously introducing amendments to the K-P Right to Information (RTI) Act to make it fallible, it also opened up a Pandora’s box to encourage the bureaucracy in Punjab to rein in the Punjab RTI Act as well. A three-member committee has been formed by the Punjab chief secretary to revisit the Punjab RTI law and the powers of the Punjab Information Commission. The committee, comprising the secretary of information, the secretary of law and the secretary of implementation and coordination, was formed subsequent to a query regarding details of the expenses of the Punjab Governor’s House. A committee, comprising solely of secretaries will, in the words of General Douglas McArthur, owe its allegiance to the temporary occupants of the Governor’s House and not to the Constitution of the state. The committee, being more loyal than the king, will do the utmost in its power to clip the wings of the RTI Act and the Information Commission.
The fundamental question, apart from the legal ramifications, remains the same as always: why do our lawmakers consider themselves superior to their paymasters? A house financed by taxpayers’ money is answerable to the taxpayer, no matter how high the pedestal of the temporary occupant of the house may be. If I have a right to ask my domestic staff about the duties that he/she is being paid for, then I very well have a right to ask the same from a government servant, whose salary I also pay. This credo seems to be lost on our civil servants. The beleaguered citizens of this country, in general, and the civil society, in particular, have to be in a constant state of alert to defend their constitutional right from the blitzkrieg of the powers that be. To the citizens I say: stand up and defend your rights.
Dr Raza Gardezi
Shehri-CBE
Published in The Express Tribune, July 15th, 2015.
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