February 27, 2005

Our politicians never practise what they preach. It’s a problem that lies at the heart of our corruption-infested society

HAVE you ever been stuck in a time warp? Would you know if you had been? I think I am. And beginning to sound like a broken record too. Having lived in America for five years, away from the madding crowd ... distance making their malevolence sharper, my mind is riveted on the putridity of people in power who have blighted Pakistan’s progress, not once but many times over, making it a cauldron of corruption and confusion today.

Even if some chappies got nabbed and kicked into jail, they have come out laughing all the way to the bank and ended up getting bigger perks and juicer jobs in the present set-up, making us a banana republic and a laughing stock of our judges who had sentenced them in the first place. Seeing these scofflaws scot-free and swimming the tide of success — in government, private and public sectors — I feel my blood rush to my head, my intelligence smacked, and my citizenship as a Pakistani violated.

Who does not know them? They have been exposed and impugned hundreds of time. Their skins are thick and they are shameless. While society receives them with respect and honour, a miniscule of us get exercised with anger — harbouring our own private torture chambers overflowing with horror stories of their corruption and graft, smouldering in a lasting rage now bordering on resignation.

We question from here to eternity: why only do the most pernicious rule over the destinies of 150 million Pakistanis?

And they call this thievery democracy! Gen Musharraf is the latest to reinvent democracy and resurrect the ‘lota’ culture and horse-trading. See what a hogwash we have today! Now, he’s desperately making sweetheart deals with the two he banished out of his kingdom — Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — for corruption.

The ‘C’ word in Pakistan has assumed comical proportions. The corrupt themselves are calling others corrupt all the time.

For the latest on corruption, let me refer you to the gali galoch between the Sindh chief minister and his sacked revenue minister — but they are small fries, let’s first go to the barracudas of corruption.

Just imagine Asif Zardari is now filing an FIR against Nawaz Sharif’s head honcho Saifur Rehman for trying to cut off his tongue in a bid to murder him some years back? The press was agog with this news item, as if the “tongue-cutting” happened yesterday. Why did it take Zardari so long to find his tongue to lash out at Rehman, a reprehensible pipsqueak known for his pit bull terrier tactics? Hang in here, the circus has just begun ... barely had we absorbed such banality, there was Zardari again, sprawled out in his blue jeans, legs wide open, in Nawaz Sharif’s company. Hello ... what happened to the FIR and his allegations about Sharif wanting to murder him? And what came of Benazir Bhutto, who never stopped laughing at the Lahori ironsmith’s crudeness and coarse background?

Now Pinkie Bhutto — once the people’s princess and the West’s heartthrob — resplendent in her green shalwar kamiz with a jacket (wonder when she’s going to discard that odd pair) and Mian Nawaz Sharif — the self described de facto father of our bomb — are playing footsie.

As the reunited couple — Benazir and Asif — prepare to take Pakistan by storm yet the third time and destroy whatever is left, the international press is hammering away at Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General in the scandalized oil-for-food programme with Iraq, contracting the notorious inspection firm Cotecna of Switzerland — rings a bell does it? Well it’s the same firm that bribed Bhutto with $12 million for giving it a contract.

The Swiss judge charged the couple saying: “Benazir Bhutto ... knew that she was acting in a criminally reprehensible manner by abusing her role in order to obtain for herself or her husband considerable sums in the sole private interest of her family at the cost of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

While Benazir, her army of admirers and sympathizers have pooh-poohed her conviction by the Swiss courts, Kojo Annan has admitted his guilt as reported by London’s Sunday Times that “he was involved in negotiations to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi oil under the auspices of Saddam Hussein.”

In Pakistan, no one of note ever admits his/her guilt nor ever gets convicted. Right?

Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao owes the government Rs10 million as customs duty on a Mercedes Benz he imported nine years ago while he was the chief minister of the NWFP under BB. (Musharraf should never have taken him in the cabinet without him first clearing his debts to the public exchequer.) The case is pending in the courts. He’s challenged the CBR’s (Central Board of Revenue) demand that he cough up the dough, but the man responsible for the internal security of Pakistan is skirting the law by claiming that chief ministers are exempt from paying duty on imported cars. The courts have disputed his claim. Will something ever happen? Probably not.

Can you ever imagine the corrupt customs letting us get away with such blatant evasion? Never. The next day, our Mercedes would be impounded and promptly auctioned off.

The good foreign minister, a master of sartorial rites, handed over a list of people sponging off the taxpayers while performing Umrah.

Interestingly, not a squeak out of these chaps, except that Chaudhry Shujaat mumbled in his inimitable style that he paid for his tribe from his own pocket when he went to Saudi Arabia. Khurshid Kasuri, realizing he had opened a can of worms, quickly distanced himself from the damning document, blaming the Foreign Office for faulty mathematics on how much each the prime minister and his truckload of relatives had cost us.

Obviously KK didn’t want Shujaat, the kingmaker, knifing him right when next-door neighbour Natwar Singh came calling.

While Shujaat has managed to put back the lid over his Umrah misadventures by calling it a computing error that some knucklehead in Kasuri’s office had made, how does he cover the corruption charges made by the sitting chief minister Arbab Ghulam Rahim against Shujaat’s provincial secretary-general Imtiaz Shaikh.

At midnight, to be exact, the chief minister got a revelation that Shaikh had grabbed land and indulged in widespread corruption. So he had to be booted out. Heavens!

Shaikh retaliated by calling the chief minister pani chor, who had indulged in “illegal trade (make whatever you can), killings and water theft”. Hmm ...

We were in the meantime regaled with a list of civil servants and foreign office officials who were allotted 502 plots under a ‘discretionary quota’ in October 1988 — a month before Benazir Bhutto was elected prime minister for the first time. So, one can’t blame her for giving away valuable land in Islamabad at a throwaway price to babus.

It has to be the supra babu — former president Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

Talking about lists, and with me stuck in a time warp, let me recall the mother of all lists, rolled out grandly by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in 2000.

The then NAB chief Gen Amjad Hussain Syed gave us the billionaires list starting allegedly with “Asif Ali Zardari, Nawaz Sharif, Anwar Saifullah, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Manzoor Wattoo, Salman Farooqi, Ahmed Sadiq, Shaukat Kazim, Humayun Akhtar Khan, Ijazul Haq, General Fazle Haq (deceased), Lt-Gen. (retd) Zahid Ali Akbar, Gohar Ayub (retd captain), Captain Naseer, Aftab Sherpao (retd major), General (retd) Aslam Beg, Brigadier (retd) Imtiaz.”

Need I qualify the above names with who’s who and what plum jobs some hold today? I don’t think so. It would be stating the obvious since we know these names by heart ... they are stored away permanently in our memory disc.

Continuing with the alleged millionaires list are: “Jam Mashooq, Zulfiqar Magsi, Hakim Ali Zardari, Manzoor Hussain, Senator Gulzar, Javed Qureshi, Malik Ghulam Mustafa Khar, Chaudhry Shahid Nazir, Chaudhry Sher Ali, Senator Jehangir Badr, Nawab Yousaf Talpur, Nawab Mansoor Ali Khan, M.B. Abbasi, Javed Hashmi, Azam Hoti and Rana Shaukat Mahmood.”

Was Musharraf’s right hand man, Amjad Hussain Syed, merely wanting to make waves? It’s akin to asking Benazir Bhutto about corruption and she replying, “Corruption, what corruption?”

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