Daily Times

A fish starts rotting from the head — an undeniable truth that is being shamelessly falsified by unfolding events in the country. It seems uncomfortable to state, but state we must, that all the president’s men are the president’s men and thus are just doing what the president ordains. You may catch all the lower level mice but till their chief executive officer is free, the rot will return and restart. If this is true about all leadership, and we unequivocally profess this about terrorism that hitting the top leaders is the solution, why are we afraid of stating this and following this principle in politics? What has happened in Sindh is a great step that is being lauded by the public and has political support as well. Moreover, the fact that people in the police and army are also being put on trial is even more heartening. But what remains the most disconcerting factor is not that it has not reached Punjab but the fact that the top men on whose say or permission this is happening are still scot-free. The tradition of blaming and scapegoating the men below has been a hallmark of many operations in the past that yielded no sustainable results.
Strangely, the notion of cleaning from the top is considered non-democratic. Last year, when election rigging was taken up as a main subject of protest and a record sit-in was held, nearly every analyst thought that asking for the resignation of the Prime Minister (PM) was not democratic, especially on just public demand. When examples were quoted of the west, they were rejected on the grounds that they are not valid in Pakistan. But principles of democracy state that the ultimate power is with the people regardless of the country. Take the recent case of Guatemala and its president resigning last week over a public protest against corruption. The circumstances are almost identical to Pakistan. After the end of a 36-year-old civil war in the 1990s the economy has been in the doldrums. The GDP growth rate has hovered between three to four percent with high-income inequality, increasing poverty levels and high crime rate. The reason for this dismal performance has been corruption embedded in government and state institutions. The scandal that provoked Guatemala’s political crisis is known as la linea (the line), after the telephone number that customs officials allegedly called in order to conduct their corrupt dealings. The basics of the scam are fairly simple. Corrupt customs officials in Guatemala would create fake documents to give corrupt importers a steep discount on the import duties for their goods. The corrupt importer got to keep part of the discount in exchange for paying the rest as a bribe to the corrupt officials who ran the scheme. Over time, this allegedly diverted millions of dollars in customs revenue away from the state and into the private bank accounts of corrupt officials all the way up to the president.
Finally, it was the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-based commission for investigating corruption in Guatemala, that started revealing the extent of the corruption that brought a public outcry and protests in April this year. For the past five months, protesters filled Guatemala city’s central square again and again to demand that their president resign. Faces painted in patriotic blue and white, they waved their banners, chanted their slogans and bellowed their demands: the government must be held accountable to the people, corruption must end and the president must go. They achieved their goal. President Otto Perez Molina resigned after the attorney general issued a warrant for his arrest. The day before, Guatemala’s Congress had voted unanimously to strip him of his immunity so that he could be prosecuted on charges of corruption. Thus, public pressure over a period of time did bring about the downfall of decades of organized, institutional corruption. In Pakistan, we have seen clean up drives in the past, especially in the Musharraf government, but what happens is that while the people of lower ranks are caught, top leaders are allowed to escape the country on deals and then laws like National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) are made to allow them to come back with a renewed appetite for corruption.
In Pakistan, accountability normally starts at the bottom rather than the top. Most of the arrests made in Sindh are from the lowest rung on the ladder in the case of the MQM people. The trend so far is that the accused target killers are caught and a whole media story appears. These target killers name big guns in the party but the big guns are not caught due to lack of evidence. Many of the big guns then disappear from the country till the heat wears off. Babar Ghauri, whose business of illegal marriage halls is under the legal axe, is in the US and no explanation is being given of why the owners are not being prosecuted.
Similarly, Sharjeel Memon, who started this drive of illicit buildings, is himself now out of bounds. Asif Ali Zardari is holding office in Dubai and calling all his cabinet members there to hold meetings. Those who are here, like Yousaf Raza Gilani, are shown coming out of court beaming with pride and being garlanded on the legal victory of being granted bail after bail. It is baffling how Dr Asim Hussain, who is the best friend of Asif Ali Zardari and who got all those lucrative posts thanks to his friend, is now being kept in custody while the man who orchestrated, enabled and promoted him is safely sitting in Dubai issuing statements about democracy and security of this country.
Similarly, as the anti-corruption drive reaches Punjab and the Nandipur scandal unveils, the Managing Director (MD) is called in for an explanation. The PM and the ministers who were directly promoting and inaugurating the project are merely expressing their displeasure at the mismanagement that for the last two years has been reportedly losing billions of public money. In a blatantly top-led Model Town operation in which 100 people were shot, the Assistant Superintendent Police (ASP), etc, were removed while Rana Sanaullah was restored and the chief minister was given a clean chit. There has been a lot of demand for accountability across the board in all provinces, as it should be, but if it is just bottom to middle, then the top will survive, disappear and rear its ugly head again to spread its virus all the way down.

The writer is secretary information PTI Punjab, an analyst, a columnist and can be reached at andleeb.abbas1@gmail.com