19
I HOPE the Islamabad accountability court won’t take umbrage over our collective giggle when we heard its not-guilty verdict on Zardari’s corruption charges in the SGS-Cotecna case.
As the National Accountability Bureau plans to appeal against the verdict, I won’t go into it except to say that it seemed entirely based on the fact that the prosecution presented photocopies, and not the original documents. However, the originals were said to be available with other courts in Pakistan.
In the mid-1990s when the contentious deal was signed under Benazir Bhutto’s second stint in power, the two Swiss sister companies that had pre-shipment inspection operations all over the globe began setting up their offices in Karachi. I met an English executive from Cotecna who had just moved to Pakistan, and over dinner, he told me categorically that a kickback had been paid to secure the contract.
Corruption has a long history in our part of the world.
Be that as it may, who is a mere freelance hack to question the wisdom of the Islamabad accountability court? For all I know, the Cotecna executive may have made up the allegation to malign the government of the day. However, we have also heard about the millions of dollars held in Swiss bank accounts controlled by holding companies allegedly set up by our ex-president.
But then nobody has denied the ownership of multi-million pound Knightsbridge properties in London. Reportedly acquired by the Sharif family, together with other houses and flats, questions are no longer asked about how they were paid for. Persistent rumours and allegations float over many of our politicians, bureaucrats, judges and generals.
This is the problem of spending time in Karachi: at most social functions, the conversation invariably turns to sundry scams. Currently, we are told Dr Asim Hussain, Asif Zardari’s long-time buddy and alleged bagman, has been singing like a canary about the various kickbacks he has supposedly been collecting for his friend. The media mentioned that in this mixed bag, there was a monthly payment made by Pakistan State Oil. When I asked a director in the company about it, he laughed in my face and said that as a public-sector corporate body, there was no way PSO would be making any kind of illegal payment.
I suppose the lesson here is not to believe everything the media reports about corrupt practices. And I am too old and cynical to trust all the allegations that regularly hit my inbox. Nevertheless, the incessant stories about scams in high places makes it hard to tell fact from fiction.
Against this backdrop of public sleaze, I often wonder what children make of it all. Taught at home, at mosques and at school to be honest and truthful, they live in a world where public figures routinely cheat and lie, and where popular TV anchors are constantly making accusations of corruption.
So how do they reconcile what they are taught by their religion, their teachers and their parents with what they see and hear around them every day of their lives? I fear they lose their innocence early in life, and become cynical at a young age.
When my son Shakir was growing up during my civil service days in the 1980s, corrupt officials made an effort not to flaunt their ill-gotten gains. No longer. Now, corruption is the norm, not the exception. If somebody manages to stay clean, his junior colleagues see him as somebody who will not take advantage of his position, and obstruct others from cashing in, too.
I thought I was beyond the point where I could be shocked by anything until a cousin recently told me about an IT project his company was working on with the Sindh government. Apart from routine demands for free laptops, he told me that after working hours in a provincial government office, staff would collect all the bribes they had garnered that day and make piles to be passed on to various officials, going up to the secretary. No attempt was made to hide this brazen behaviour from an outsider.
In our righteous anger against corruption, we often forget that it actually has a long history in our part of the world. The Mughals would expect a substantial nazrana for the grant of a money-making position or title. The size of this gift would determine if the required favour would be granted. This set the tone for the entire government machinery of the day.
The East India Company continued this tradition, with its officials making fortunes, and buying vast estates on their return to England where they were known as nabobs, or White Mughals. Many of today’s aristocratic families can trace their origins to those days.
Time launders and whitens all sleazy fortunes. Even the descendants of British slave-traders are comfortable in the mansions built on the misery of African slaves. In Pakistan, many of the fine houses we see in posh areas were paid for by the heroin trade.
No wonder our kids are becoming so cynical.
Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2015
