Daily Times

To be fair, I am also a part of the same rot I cry against. I willingly dish out a bribe as and when required. And I don’t mind rationalizing my actions. Let me clarify. I got my passport made few months ago. My first visit to the passport office was nightmarish given the swarm of the people jostling to get into the office at 9 am. I guess a tout nearby read my face and offered his services for a payoff. I readily agreed and duly arrived the next day only to be welcomed by a half a kilometer long queue. While I was wondering as to how the tout will let me in, he made me sit on the rear seat of an employee of the passport office who had just arrived. Voila. I was smuggled into the office. The rest just followed like clockwork and I was out after completing a multi-stage process in 30 minutes flat. Heaving a sigh of relief, I looked rather condescendingly at the wretched souls stuck in the ‘process’ and walked away with the conviction that I had done nothing wrong.

These things happen to most of us and not given much thought given the stunningly widespread societal acceptance of bribery as a social norm. We amusingly narrate the incident to our families and friends. We term our behavior practicality, reinforcing in process our tolerance to a disease, not realizing that we are bequeathing poison to our children. Blaming public sector for all the corruption is misleading. Private sector is not far behind but the modus operandi is different and subject to speculation. It colludes with the public sector in seeking rent, claiming its own pound of flesh from the hapless public. Take, for example, the cartel of the three leading car manufacturers of Pakistan and how it continues to savage Pakistanis raking in billions every year. Imagine multiple price hikes every year blamed by the automakers on the dollar. Imagine spending around Rs. 2.5 million on a 1300cc car with visibly inferior locally sourced parts. Imagine Airbag and Immobilizer as luxury features. Imagine ceaseless whining against used imported cars in a bid to kill fair competition.

Pakistani currency bears the picture of our Quaid, someone known for his unimpeachable integrity and honesty. It also carries a verse of Quran forbidding bribery with the warning that both the giver and taker are destined for hell. The irony, it seems, is totally lost on us. We don’t see corruption as an existential threat like extremism

Combating corruption in Pakistan especially in the public sector is perhaps one of our biggest challenges.  To be fair, there are laws and checks in place, but get conveniently bent as gratified enforcers look the other way. While there could be a range of complementary measures from empowering accountability institutions to making ethics a part of our curriculum to incessant dissemination of anti-corruption discourse through all media streams, we must not lose sight of how the latest tech can help us tame this monster. Technology can be leveraged to complement the existing framework to fight corruption. Human progress is generating enormous amounts of data and innovative tools to make sense of it. In public procurement, data mining is being used to identify red flags, patterns of collusion and false information. Researchers at the Corruption Research Center Budapest regularly examine huge data sets of public procurement from EU countries and search for abnormal patterns such as exceptionally short bidding periods or bids repeatedly won by the same company.

I recently read a piece in a local magazine by Burhan Rasool, a technology expert involved with the public sector automation.  He posits the creation of a central repository of individual financial profiles for all the government officers and their dependents. This can be achieved through integration of multiple databases maintained by provincial& federalentities.

The integrated database should include complete service history of all government employees, payroll data, B-Form data of all dependents after cross verification from NADRA, other sources of income like inheritance or a working spouse, tax profiles from FBR, bank account details from SBP, sale/purchase of land data from Land Revenue Management Information System (LRMIS), Excise data for vehicle ownership, travel history from FIA, credit card payment history etc. This database should be mined by intelligent, programmable bots for patterns to identify corrupt officials. .

Countries are also moving towards automating service delivery processes and open data. This technology framework has the potential to innovatively fight corruption. However, technology is not a quick fix or a permanent solution. The embrace of technology has to be backed by a qualitative change in the ethical makeup of our through education. Pakistani money bears the picture of our Quaid, someone known for his unimpeachable integrity and honesty. It also carries a verse of Quran forbidding bribery with the warning that both the giver and taker are destined for hell. The irony, it seems, is totally lost on us. We don’t see corruption as an existential threat like extremism. We should. Extremism shuns inquiry, independence of thought instilling thoughtless conformance and stasis. Corruption slowly and quietly eats into the moral fibre, hollowing out the society to death. Extremism and corruption are both cancerous and destroy the whole organism if left untreated.

The writer has years of experience with both corporate and public sectors

Published in Daily Times, January 28^th 2019.