Of glad Baboos, perturbed members and indecisive PAC chairman

After the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Wafaqi Mohtasib (Federal Ombudsman) Secretariat, the parliamentary watchdog Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has also become dysfunctional for weeks now, as its chairman, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, is in two minds whether he should resign or not.
The baboos (bureaucrats) in various federal ministries and their subsidiaries feel comfortable because there had been no PAC meetings since Ch Nisar’s move to disband all subordinate bodies of the committee in reaction to the appointment of Akhtar Buland Rana as the Auditor-General of Pakistan (AGP). As the PAC was all set to review audit objections pertaining to financial years 2008-09 and 2009-10 before Rana’s appointment, top bureaucrats, mindful of corruption and embezzlement worth billions, had been getting the jitters.
The PAC members are also perturbed over the situation arising from Ch Nisar’s shilly-shallying.
Nadeem Afzal Chan, a member the PAC, said Ch Nisar had turned an ideally-functional body into a dysfunctional one. “It took a lot of efforts on part of the PAC to clear backlog of audit reports … and still there are many important audit issues that are pending but the chairman is not summoning a meeting, which is a grave source of concern for the committee members,” he said.
Chan said the PAC members would requisite a PAC meeting if the chairman did not convene it in a day or two.
PML-N central leader and Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Ch Nisar Ali Khan had warned last month that he would step down as Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman if the government continued creating hurdles in the implementation of its decisions.
Later, in the last week of August, Khan dissolved all the sub-committees of the powerful parliamentary watchdog, to protest the appointment of Akhtar Buland Rana as Auditor-General of Pakistan. Yasmeen Rehman, another PAC member, said that she would take up the issue with committee chairman Ch Nisar during the current National Assembly session and hoped that the parliamentary body would become functional soon. “This committee has done wonders in past three years and will soon resume its task with the same force of sincerity,” she said, voicing concerns over the fact that the PAC had not met for the last many weeks.
Meanwhile, Ch Nisar Ali Khan called on Sharif brothers last week in Lahore and apprised them of his decision that he could not work with “controversial” AGP Akhtar Buland Rana hence he was going to resign.
Sources say some central leaders of the PML-N including party president Nawaz Sharif are still advising Nisar not to resign as his move would provide open space to the government to carry on with its “corrupt practices”. They think that despite government’s non-cooperation and efforts to create hurdles in the PAC’s smooth functioning, the parliamentary watchdog is the only accountability body safeguarding country’s financial interests and has also recovered around Rs 115 billion in last three years.
Another group of the PML-N leaders is supporting Nisar’s viewpoint and it argues that Nisar’s resignation from the committee, with a pro-government AGP in place, would help the PML-N get rid of PPP’s taunts that the government has given a crucial slot to the opposition.
These leaders think that in the coming days, the PAC would not be able to render brilliant services due to presence of the AGP having a tilt towards government. It is pertinent to mention here that apart from the appointment of Akhtar Buland Rana as AGP, Ch Nisar is also upset over non-implementation of the PAC verdict in the National Logistic Cell (NLC) scam.
The PAC, in first week of July this year, had told the authorities concerned to initiate a disciplinary action against three retired generals including Lt General (retd) Khalid Munir Khan, Lt General (retd) Muhammad Afzal Muzaffar and Major General (retd) Khalid Zaheer Akhtar for causing a loss of Rs1.8 billion to the NLC by making faulty investments in the stock exchange. But the government has yet to initiate action the retired generals.
Riaz Fatiana, a PML-Q MNA and PAC member, argued that since AGP Rana had been administered oath by the chief justice, therefore there was no reason to keep the controversy alive.
“The PAC recovered billions of rupees and its credit goes to its chairman and all of its members … the parliamentary body should be made functional at the earliest,” he said. Fatiana proposed that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani should take initiative to convince the PAC chairman to not to resign and summon the PAC meeting.