Two acquittals by accountability courtsin high-profile corruption cases, and a contempt of court notice served to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) in the last one day, has further exposed how big a farce the accountability process under the PTI government over the past three years really is. Sixteen persons, including a PML(N) MPA, who were made part of a reference in the SaafPani corruption case filed by NAB in 2018were found not guilty of any alleged financial malfeasance or procedural irregularities. Separately, Mir Shakil Ur Rehman, who was arrested and kept behind bars for eight months in relation to a 34-year old property transaction dispute case was also acquitted, with the court commenting that pursuing the case further would be a “futile exercise” due to a lack of evidence presented by NAB. Lastly, the IHC issued a notice to the NAB chairman asking why an investigationm into former President Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s assets had not been initiated by the accountability watchdog despite the court’s ruling that Musharraf had been an office holder and therefore was not exempt from a probe into how he amassed assets well beyond his known sources of income.
All three cases display a selective system of accountability that was heavily influenced by politics, that was quite obviously skewed against opposition politicians and bureaucrats related to past regimes. That the prosecution in theses cases was not able to produce a shred of evidence that would support its case but was still able to keep the accused incarcerated for months, in some cases years, just goes to show how the motivation behind the entire exercise never really was to genuinely address the ‘menace of corruption’ but to persecute the opposition into submission and in some cases even to settle petty personal scores.
NAB’s resistance to pursuing certain individuals or cases with the same ferocity and determination to arrest with which it has gone after virtually every major opposition politician, including a former Prime Minister and a sitting provincial assembly speaker, is a symptom of the malaise that runs much deeper than just the individuals calling the shots at NAB. Those who pushed this policy through in 2018 are perhaps now dialing it back as the political climate changes and the net effect of this failed accountability experiment is that abuse of public office for financial gain has only increased.
