It is a matter of great shame that Pakistan is ranked among the top most corrupt countries of the world. This dubious distinction has been earned over sixty three years of our existence under the decadent colonial system of governance with in-built avenues of corruption and misuse of power. Corruption is defined as improper and unlawful conduct intended to secure a benefit for oneself or for somebody else. Its forms include bribery, misuse of authority or inside information and extortion. It exists where a community or a society is indifferent or there is a lack of enforcement policies.
In the legal domain corruption means: abuse of public trust, act of bribing, embezzlement, act of profiteering, baseness, breach of faith, breach of trust, complicity, conduct involving graft, corrupt inducement, crime, criminality, debasement, deception, deviation from rectitude, deviousness, disgrace, dishonesty, disloyalty, disrepute, fraud, improbity, injustice, jobbery, knavery, lack of conscience, lack of principle, malignancy, turpitude, unscrupulousness, venality and wickedness.
Perceived in the backdrop of the foregoing, corruption is decidedly a social ailment and no society is or can claim to be completely immune from this cancerous affliction. However the degree of corruption differs from society to society depending on the health and efficacy of the system of governance. It is universally recognized that tackling corruption is basically the responsibility of the governments who are supposed to devise such policies and systems of governance which are designed to eliminate corrupt practices from the government machinery, encourage ethical behavior within the society and are also geared to ensure social, political and economic progress in conformity with the aspirations of the people.
For the governments to be able to deliver on these cherished goals, it is also imperative to have an inbuilt accountability mechanism in place to check the indiscreet and corrupt behavior of the bureaucracy and public representatives. Therefore the best system of governance is where there is an indiscriminate and across the board accountability of the public representatives and the government functionaries.
MALIK MUHAMMAD ASHRAF
Lahore
