….and other musings
It didn’t come as much of a surprise. Since its very inception in 2006, the Rental Power Projects had a shady connotation to them. This element of shadiness became much more pronounced in public discourse during the term of the incumbent government. The NAB’s request to place some of the key players in the RPP deal on the Exit Control List simply vindicates the detractors’ point of view.
Does it confirm those suspicions, though? Like paratroopers without a chute on, the “investigative” reporting community in the country have a predilection for jumping to conclusions. Let us reread the verdict here. Is there a “smoking gun” for corruption just yet? Financial and procedural irregularities there have been many and those need to be dealt with in the spirit of the law. But there needs be clarity in what is known so far. A media gone berserk and a public gone testy don’t make for rational, thoughtful investigations that go into the heart of the matter. Many simply get in the way of the stampede; consider former finance minister Shaukat Tarin, who is also to be on the ECL, even though he smelled wrongdoing earlier on, conducted an audit and exercised the extent of his ambit as finance minister to undo the damage.
So far, NAB has asked for this list of people to be put on the ECL, nothing more. Earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered for the RPP deals to be scrapped, on basis of irregularities. It is the duty of the court to arrive to a conclusion, not the media.
While the court should work diligently to recover the public’s money and, indeed, punish those involved in corruption, there also needs to be an eye on principles here. The government’s strategy: instead of trying to overcome the problem of circular debt, it opted to go for a stop-gap arrangement and got power plants on rent. Even the most spirited supporters of the government felt queasy defending this strategy. But the job of the judiciary is not to zero in on bad decisions. It is to identify where there has been corruption or, as it had dutifully done till now, to identify procedural irregularities.
It is not the job of the judiciary to question the merits of a sitting government’s decisions. Its job is only to question their legality. Political governments are mandated to make bad decisions. This would take a little while to get used to in our orphaned republic where the gods of democracy have been unkind. This – not a cruel dictator – is the true test of an honest judiciary.
