NAB chief resignation

Aftab Sultan has walked out of the powerful Office of the Chairman National Accountability Bureau — a rarity in our part of the world. Sultan’s resignation as NAB chief had been accepted several days after speculation began that he wanted to quit due to the pressure on him to take actions that he found “unacceptable”. Sultan confirmed there was pressure on him from the PDM coalition government, although he did not go into specifics. However, hours after his resignation, former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife were told to appear before NAB in the toshkhana case.

Sultan, a former bureaucrat with an LLM from the University of Cambridge, had a reputation for honesty, having been made OSD — a virtual suspension — by former president Pervez Musharraf in 2002 for refusing to support his sham referendum. Sultan is the one who is involved in preparing the investigation report in the Bank of Punjab scam case and reportedly offended former prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and former president Asif Zardari by refusing to allow misuse of certain intelligence assets or to share some sensitive information with the Presidency, as he had made it loud and clear that he was only legally bound to inform and advise the Prime Minister.

Sultan has also been credited in some circles for ensuring the survival of the Nawaz Sharif government by providing evidence against some of the alleged backers of the PTI’s 2014 dharna that continued for 126 days and only culminated in the wake of the gruesome APS attack. This last case is why some PML-N leaders were reportedly under the misguided belief that Sultan — who was then serving as director general of the Intelligence Bureau — was loyal to them, when in fact, what he actually did was simply do his job honestly, regardless of who ended up benefitting from it.

Unlike his predecessor, Javed Iqbal, who was regularly accused of using NAB to attack and harass the then-ruling PTI’s opponents while protecting the party’s own supporters from investigation or prosecution, Sultan refused to turn the screws on PTI leaders or make cases go away for PDM members. This is despite the fact that Imran regularly tried to throw mud at Sultan, accusing him of involvement in bribing journalists and violating import rules. Unsurprisingly, no evidence to support these allegations was ever offered.

In his short tenure as NAB chief, Sultan has been credited with shifting the anti-corruption watchdog’s focus to only pursuing cases where there is solid evidence, rather than investigating outlandish claims and following a ‘guilty till proven innocent’ approach as was done by Iqbal and several other of his predecessors, who would detain people on flimsy evidence for years. However, given how politicised NAB has been since its formation, even if this is Sultan’s only achievement in office, he will still go down as the best NAB chief ever.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 23^rd, 2023.

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