Daily Times

It is always difficult to impute motives that spur people to indulge in ways they do. I am almost constrained to call it a perennial mystery.

Besides crimes driven by need, there are those which are committed to satiate one’s lust for money, and there are those which are driven by megalomaniac occupation.

Then there is a contagious species of people who use their acquired power base to lay the foundations of a financial empire which, with time, becomes an all-consuming monster. The evil combination of the two instruments of leverage helps the perpetrator to turn one business project into many over a short period of time. Loans are secured but never returned, ultimately written off. Changes are made in corporate laws and rules to secure profits. State projects are allocated to parties against payment of hefty commissions. Competition is muted by manipulating relevant processes and procedures. Records are either destroyed, or tampered with. And, on top hovers a threatening syndrome of fear. This is the making of the godfather.

Once the monster of corruption has been raised, the next challenge for the godfather is how to guard it?

He starts looking around for ways and machinations to do so. He recruits a conglomerate of decrepit foot soldiers to extend a helping hand in protecting the criminal empire, but they do so for their own pound of flesh. So, the defence of the corruption empire starts breeding a mafia of its own.

Simultaneously, in order to defend the wobbly structure, and maintain the facade of public innocence, the godfather undertakes building a canard of lies so thick that virtually no one is able to penetrate it. He also renders the state institutions dysfunctional in his stifling executive control by appointing the most maleficent of the lot as their heads. In the process, they become bulwarks against any attempt to uncover the trail of corruption.

But the mafia which has been created grows restless: seeing so much money so close begets hunger of its own. They demand a bigger slice of the illicit empire and another monster takes shape, another challenge faces the godfather.

Tackling this monster requires use of an assortment of Machiavellian tricks like creating financial opportunities, sharing a chunk of the power base, dividing the ranks of the more lustful type, and if some still remain recalcitrant, resorting to eliminate them. So, what the godfather seemingly has at the end of the trek is a well-oiled, fully functional, corrupt oligarchy that he uses to force the state to become subservient to the demands and needs of his corruption, as also the large mafia of the corrupt who have become his accomplices through the cycle of crime. Their combined interest is to keep it all under the wraps and ensure that no one gets a peep into the sprawling, illicit kingdom.

At least in theory, untangling the crime appears to be a simple matter: get hold of the record and move backwards to its source — a recipe simple to write, but difficult to administer. This is where all the tricks of the guardian monster, the godfather, come into play, thwarting the effort to unravel the mystery. Records are not made available, reported lost or put to fire, witnesses tutored, bought or scared away, integrity of the concerned investigating authorities rendered controversial and a ring of conspiracies woven to surround the proceedings. All this goes on in broad daylight under the scanner of the parliament which has sworn to undo any violation of the constitution.

But the most heart-breaking wall is erected by the so-called educated mafia who use the power of their pen and the spoken word to camouflage the godfather, the doings of his accomplices and the attendant motivations. Every morning and every evening, this coterie of old hands and neo-converts replicate the pontiff, preaching holy lessons in the art of good governance and proclaiming the innocence of the godfather in exchange for a variety of gratifications.

Not only do they flaunt their intellectual corruption with audacity, they do so with disdain for the responsibility that rests on their shoulders in helping the state uncover the trail of crime. They become ardent carriers of corruption and all its attendant ills. They hide behind a host of ill-conceived arguments and alibis, mostly talking of conspiracies and the fear of the military taking over. They bemoan that heavens shall come crashing down if the corrupt were removed from power.

The state of such people is amply illustrated by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “Oh, tell me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests, and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else. Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!”

Everyone knows that the godfather and his mafia have ravaged the country, but there is none willing to come forth and help unravel the putridity of their doings. The silence is deafening which is cleverly and artfully orchestrated as helplessness rather than what it really is — morbid collusion!

The carnival goes on. Corruption remains rampant. The institutions and their heads remain complicit. The mafia continues raising the stakes as it has to feed more mouths. The parliament feigns ignorance. The media pontiffs continue issuing holy sermons. And the state is reduced to looking like a horrible skeleton of its sovereign self, an abject captive in the vice-like grip of the godfather and his attendant mafia.

Remember what Martin Luther King had to say about such sordid state: “The day we see truth and cease to speak is the day we begin to die”.

The writer is a political and security strategist, and heads the Regional Peace Institute — an Islamabad-based think tank. Email: raoofhasan@hotmail.com. Twitter: @RaoofHasan

Published in Daily Times, June 25th, 2017.