Transparent leaders

Published April 26, 2016
The writer is president of Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency.
The writer is president of Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency.

LEGISLATORS’ statements of assets and liabilities are once again in the news, after the leaked Panama Papers raised serious questions about the financial transparency of political leadership in Pakistan. Despite a critical need for transparency, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) took seven months to release the statements of assets and liabilities on Apr 21.

The Representation of the People Act, 1976 was amended in 2002 by then Gen Pervez Musharraf’s government, to make it obligatory upon national and provincial legislators to submit annual statements of assets and liabilities to the ECP by Sep 30 each year. The law also requires the ECP to publish these statements in the official gazette. The intent of this law is to ensure greater transparency of the financial affairs of our elected representatives. Although many critics of the law claim that this requirement was added by a military regime in order to tighten the screws on politicians, similar requirements are found in the laws in many democratic countries. For example, India’s Representation of People Act, 1951 also requires their parliamentarians to submit statements of assets and liabilities.

Some of the parliamentarians in Pakistan have branded the law as discriminatory, as assets and liabilities statements of civil and military officials, and judges, are not required to be made public. The case of state employees is, however, different from that of elected representatives; therefore, a comparison may not be fair. Various government departments and bodies do have a system for receiving employees’ statements of assets and liabilities, which are then supposed to be scrutinised at the departmental level.

Any abnormal increase in assets is supposed to trigger a departmental inquiry. Since elected representatives do not have a hierarchy of reporting, and are answerable to the public, it is appropriate to make their statements of assets and liabilities public — so that these enable voters in judicious exercise of their right to vote in subsequent elections.


The ECP must make it easier for citizens to access the financial statements of their elected representatives.


The system of declaring assets and liabilities, however, suffers from some serious weaknesses; if this exercise is expected to be meaningful the system needs to be reformed. First, the structure of ‘Form XXI’ as given in the Representation of the People Rules (Conduct of Election), 1977 should be modified to remove ambiguities. For example, the ‘cost of assets’ and ‘present value of property’ has been left to the imagination of the filer. This ambiguity alone can make or break the very system of assets declaration. A uniform system needs to be adopted to assess the present value of elected officials’ assets.

Second, there is not much merit in seeking details and value of their inherited property. If the market value of an old asset or property has increased, it should not give the false impression of an abnormal or suspicious increase in assets. It should be sufficient to ask filers to give details of their new assets acquired during the reporting period, along with the actual price paid. This will eliminate the need for arbitrary estimates and assessments of the value of assets and property.

Currently, the ECP does not seem to check for accuracy, completeness or even legibility of the statements which have been submitted. The ECP simply scans the forms as submitted, and includes a photocopy of the statement in the official gazette. An overview of completed forms, as printed in the gazette, indicates serious gaps, inaccuracies and cases of illegibility of handwritten figures and words. It is important that the ECP have the legal authority, and the capacity, to review submitted statements — at least for their completeness and legibility.

Accessibility of the official gazette which carries statements of assets and liabilities is another issue. It is a rather complicated procedure for a citizen to obtain a copy of this gazette. The whole idea of making these statements public is that the maximum number of citizens should have access to the details submitted by their representatives, for transparency and effective accountability.

If a piece of information is widely circulated, chances are that the filers will be more circumspect while filing their statements. A limited circulation can defeat the very purpose of making these statements public. Modern information technology can be a great help in disseminating this information inexpensively. After a long struggle, the ECP finally agreed to place statements on its website; accessible to all citizens without the need to file a request or purchase a printed copy of the gazette through complex procedures. However, it is a pity that the ECP recently took the regressive step of removing statements from its website on the flimsy pretext that they were not legally bound to disclose these statements online.

When the law was amended, technology was neither as popular nor as advanced as it is now; it is now both inexpensive and efficient to release the statements online. After all, there is no law that requires the ECP to have its own website — but they claim, like many other state institutions, to have a dedicated website for a more efficient dissemination of information. In this day and age, it is difficult to imagine why an entity would not use information technology to disseminate such information which it is obliged to share with the public.

The ECP takes a very long time to make the statements public through gazette notification. The statements made public by the ECP on April 21, 2016 pertain to the period July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015. The deadline for submitting statements to the ECP was Sept 30, 2015. It is inexplicable why the ECP should take seven months just to publish these documents without making a single amendment. After all, published statements require only photocopying and printing of pages. There is lower public and media interest for information which is not current.

The ECP should not only reverse its decision to remove the statements of assets and liabilities from its website, it should make these public within a month of the submission deadline.

The writer is president of Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development And Transparency.

Published in Dawn, April 26th, 2016

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