Daily Times

Guess who’s left looking embarrassed and silly now that Transparency International (TI) has itself clarified, before the BBC no less, that data used in its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2020 was from 2019 and 2020? Wasn’t it the selected prime minister himself that first said that the report was based on figures from the PML-N government’s days? And, of course, that was all that was needed for his hired mouthpieces to go into overdrive; some of them even suggesting that the opposition would only understand the report when it was translated into Urdu.

Now they’ve suddenly lost their tongues because it turns out that Pakistan has actually slipped a few places on the CPI for the first time in at least 10 years. In fact, during Nawaz Sharif’s last tenure as prime minister Pakistan’s position was improving. Now here we have an international organistaion – TI is Berlin-based, after all – which provides all the proof that is needed of the fact that the selected government’s claim of accountability rings hollow and it is just busy eating off the fat of the land.
Wasn’t it the selected prime minister who always took an international institution’s seal of authenticity on claims of corruption regarding Pakistani governments as the absolute Gold Standard? And didn’t he always wave previous CPI reports in people’s faces as proof that Pakistan’s past rulers were corrupt, even when Pakistan’s position was slowly improving?

So why is PTI throwing a fit this time around? TI has noted increase in corruption in Pakistan for two years running now. Those with even slightly long memories will remember how last time, when Firdous Ashiq Awan was the information minister, the government flatly rejected the report and the information ministry formally called it an attempt to malign Pakistan internationally. This time they’ve tried to put the blame on past governments, as usual, and instead of accepting the facts and promising to make things better they are still trying to act defiant and only falling over each other like headless chicken in the process.

Now, slowly, the whole world is realising that the opposition in Pakistan was right all along. And what the government has been selling as unflinching accountability is actually political victimisation of the kind that has not been seen before in this country. Soon enough, when reports like TI’s CPI will be seen together with instances like the Supreme Court noticing “political engineering” in some of NAB’s most high-profile cases recently, everybody will be able to put two and two together and understand what is really happening over here. At that time, PTI’s spokespersons, whose only job is to shout louder than opposition figures on TV shows, will leave the selected party like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

In just half its term, then, the selected party has pushed the opposition against the wall, reduced the economy to the worst in the region, and even made Pakistan lose the support of some of its most crucial international allies. Even countries that were willing to lend this government money to keep Pakistan solvent, because of time-enduring ties that were cultivated over more than half a century, are now thinking twice before even talking to somebody from Pakistan.

It shouldn’t take much more for whoever selected this government to reaslise that this trend is not going to get any better in the next half of the electoral cycle. There’s nothing to suggest that employment, inflation, or revenue collection will improve in any way. There’s also no telling when the stalled IMF program will resume and what concessions the government will have to make before it can happen. And even as the so called establishment is scrambling some of its own men for damage control exercises with old friends, they can see that getting some relationships back to where they were will take a lot more time than it took to spoil them. Meantime, there’s only so long the country can be treated to the spectacle of incarcerating all prominent opposition politicians in the name of accountability when everybody knows that the entire exercise is one big witch hunt.

Imran Khan used to say that when there is corruption in government the people pay for it through higher prices for no fault of their own. Now we have a government that has been called out for corruption. And we definitely have out-of-control prices that people are having to pay for no reason whatsoever. So would the selected PM, or one of his undying loyalists, explain this to the people without blaming all this on Nawaz Sharif as well?