Mr Shah is the PAC chairman directly as the result of the Charter of Democracy signed between Ms Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. The reason for giving the PAC chairman slot to the opposition leader instead of a member of the ruling party was to introduce greater transparency and accountability in public finances, so that the people of Pakistan could begin to trust their democratic institutions. Mr Shah’s blatant abuse of that trust, however, threatens to eviscerate what little confidence the public is beginning to have in parliamentary democracy. Of course, the right thing to do for Mr Shah would be to order the Auditor General and the National Accountability Bureau to take action against those responsible for the nepotism in question. But if Mr Shah cannot get himself to do the right thing, then he should at least try the respectable course of action, which would be to recuse himself from any hearings that relate to the PPP tenure in office and focus entirely on accountability for government actions during other tenures. The PPP, for all its flaws, has played a key role in shaping some of Pakistan’s finest institutions, including the legislature. The least Mr Shah could do as a member of the PPP would be to not sully that legacy with such blatant acts of partisanship and abuse of authority.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 7th, 2015.
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