‘Dubious’ credentials

Aviation Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan has provided even more details of the number of pilots in Pakistan with “dubious” qualifications and the actions being taken against them. At a press conference on Friday, Sarwar said that 262 pilots with “dubious” credentials will be barred from flying. Interestingly, he did not explicitly say if they will be fired or face criminal penalties for fraud, although licence-granting authorities will apparently face charges. Of the 262 pilots, 141 are from PIA, nine from Air Blue, and 10 from Serene. The other 102 belong to flying clubs or work for chartered plane services. At the same news conference, the minister also reminded that PIA’s unrelated fake degree inquiry, which began under the previous government and is looking into all staff, had found at least 648 fake degree holders — 129 cabinet crew members, 16 cockpit crew, 98 from engineering, and 415 from general administration.

Of course, instead of these people being summarily sacked for the fraudulent means through which they got their jobs, they were being defended by parliamentarians, including at least one prominent PML-N leader whose own rise from lowly airline employee to the Senate has long been questioned. Indeed, there have been regular calls from both PPP and PML-N leaders to spare PIA employees who were hired based on fake credentials. “Think about their families,” they say. At the same time, such leaders regularly fly abroad for medical treatment because they don’t trust the doctors in Pakistan. Should we demand that such politicians get their next surgery done by roadside hakeems and quacks? Don’t they also have families to feed?

In all seriousness, if we spare PIA staff because they committed fraud to feed their families, we should also ban the prosecution of any criminal, politicians included, who have children. And yes, the PIA staff are criminals. They defrauded the taxpayer that subsidises PIA, and they defrauded competent job applicants who they were hired ahead of them. It doesn’t matter how good they were at their jobs later.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 28^th, 2020.

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