Vigilance bodies ‘will encourage corruption’

Committees to investigate graft cases against district govt officials.

LAHORE:

Officials have voiced concerns that the Punjab government’s plan to set up District Vigilance Committees to investigate corruption cases against local government representatives will prove ineffective and actually open the door to more corruption.

An official privy to the Punjab government’s plans told The Express Tribune that Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif would chair a meeting this week where he would likely approve the plan and order its implementation. He said that the committees would be led by district coordination officers (DCO) and include unofficial members nominated by the chief minister.

The government would refer all corruption cases against officials of district governments and tehsil municipal administrations to the committees and then take legal action against them if the committees find them guilty.

The committees would, on receiving a complaint about corruption by officials of any local government department, summon the accused officials for personal hearings.

They would also deal with cases registered against former tehsil and district nazims arising out of irregularities discovered in audits of local government accounts.

A senior official of the Anti Corruption Establishment (ACE) questioned the purpose of the committees. “There is no need for these committees when the government already has the Anti Corruption Establishment with a total manpower of 1,526 including 275 officers of grade 16 and above,” the official said. “Are they saying that ACE has become ineffective?”

He said he believed that the new committees were being set up to dole out favours to cronies. “They are aimed at accommodating local political figures who have been ignored since the PML-N came into power,” he said.

He added that the District Vigilance Committees sounded very similar to the Khidmat Committees established under the last Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government in the 1990s. “They are recycling old ideas which had failed to deliver,” he added.

A DCO said on the condition of anonymity that he believed that leading the committees would be a burden on the already overworked office. “The office of DCO already has to deal with multiple administrative and revenue issues,” he said.

He pointed out that the DCO already had the executive power to initiate an inquiry and take action against corrupt officials on the basis of complaints from citizens, and that ACE had posted deputy directors and assistant directors at the district level to check corruption. “The new committees will just confuse everything and lead to political interference in official business,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 19^th, 2011.