Safe hands

The announcement of the decision to nominate Interior Secretary Major (Retd) Chaudhry Qamar Zaman as Chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) finally breaks a logjam. NAB has been without a chairman since May 28 this year after the Supreme Court had declared illegal the appointment of former NAB chairman Admiral (Retd) Fasih Bokhari.



The vacancy at the top in NAB has led to a virtual paralysis of the organisation, a situation noted by the apex court in the last month when it urged the government to make an appointment soon or ‘face the consequences’. Major (Retd) Zaman has a long career as a bureaucrat stretching back to the time of General Ziaul Haq, and prior to the election he was recommended for the post of chief secretary Punjab, a post he refused. He was not thought to be in the running for the NAB post and his appointment may surprise some.

The post of NAB chairman is a sensitive one. The agency is tasked with keeping government and the bureaucracy clean, and in that it has been intermittently successful. Political interference has, in the past, significantly impeded the progress of its investigations and this latest appointment may be viewed as a ‘safe pair of hands’ in that the appointee seems to have satisfied his many masters in the past and negotiated the often tricky waters of the bureaucracy without getting himself into any major difficulty. Objections to his appointment were swift, with the PTI condemning it and claiming that they had not been consulted in the matter — denied — and that it was a deal cooked up between the PML-N and the PPP.

As a career bureaucrat he has taken political directions for many years, but if his nomination is ratified then he will be seeking to take to task those who were his former political masters, a prospect few of them are going to be delighted at. Investigating the alleged wrongdoings of some of the most powerful people in the land takes determination and a steely resolve. Whether Major (Retd) Chaudhry Qamar Zaman is the right man for the job only time will tell.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2013.

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