Morally unfit to hold public office

Now or never! Put their feet to the fire and watch the worms crawl out of the woodworks where they mined fortunes at the expense of the state they swore on the Holy Quran to serve honestly. Watched helplessly by the citizenry, their corruption was an open secret, recorded and reported by independent media persons. There may be a dearth of good, credible investigative journalism in Pakistan, but kudos to the media, both print and TV, for keeping the pressure on the corrupt.

Readers, you don’t have to look far. Just pull out old copies of newspapers from the past several years to know how Pakistan has been pillaged by this corrupt tola. Lying in my basement are stacks of printed stories that I covered during the PPP and PML-N, PML-Q regimes spanning illicit arms deals, land grabbing, graft, cheating, misuse of authority and bank defaults. Has it been an utter waste of reams and reams of newspaper print and ink, when the same old Charlies are now salivating once again for the grand loot come election time?

The only way to stop these marauders is for the courts to act swiftly by ‘catch and kill’ the prospective candidates by first catching them and then killing their nomination papers. Forget Nawaz Sharif and Jehangir Tareen for a moment, to focus on scores of scoundrels spanning leading political parties like the PML-N, PML-Q, PPP, MQM, who have minted millions as elected representatives of this poor country. Their names have come to light many times, and yet, they continue to sneak back and get elected, not just once but many times.

The judiciary in the past failed miserably to act, being cowed down by a group of well-off lawyers posing as upholders of law and human rights. Never mind if these bad eggs have a proven record of corruption, why deny them power was the lawyers’ flawed logic. For years, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) was a deformed joke, with its subsequent chairmen kowtowing to people in power who appointed them. As was the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). It was anything but an independent and autonomous body. It failed disastrously in the disqualification of members of parliament and provincial legislatures under Article 63(2) and Article 63A of the Constitution, despite having clear proof to throw these bad eggs off the legislative process.

Today, these same political parties whose ranks are filled with members guilty of moral and financial turpitude according to Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution are bullying head of NAB Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal to go easy on their corrupt colleagues. Members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Mehmood Khan Achakzai, Syed Naveed Qamar, Sherry Rehman and Mushahid Hussain Syed accused the NAB chairman of a media trial of political figures by leaking information and documents related to them. For how long will these PAC members, who are permanent fixtures of a corrupt political system, refuse to allow truth and justice to prevail? Should the so-called sadiq and ameen legislators protect loan defaulters, criminals, money launderers, extortionists and land grabbers that NAB is out to catch?

Imran Khan’s unprecedented move to name 20 lawmakers in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Assembly for allegedly selling their votes in the Senate elections last month should be seen as a silver lining in the political landscape. Never will the PPP or the PML-N follow the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s example of cleaning out garbage from its ranks. “We are taking this decision despite knowing that it will damage the party as the elections are round the corner,” says Imran Khan. He rightly observes that for the past 30 or 40 years shady lawmakers have harvested a fortune during parliamentary elections. Trust another dodgy PPP stalwart Nayyar Bokhari to scoff at Imran Khan by calling it “a complete political gimmick.” Instead of being cheesy, Bokhari should peer into the black hole of his party’s corruption!

Published in The Express Tribune, April 22^nd, 2018.

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