DAWN - Cowasjee Corner; 03 January, 1999

End of story

By Ardeshir Cowasjee

WHEN in November 1996 the nation asked their great leader, the Tumandar of his tribe, First Citizen of the State, the then constitutionally all powerful President Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari, to initiate and complete the process of Ehtesab before thinking of Intekhab - accountability before elections - they told him how this could legitimately be done. To no avail. He developed cold feet. Was it that he realized that he would also be caught up in the process? All he did was to selfishly put into positions of power men who he trusted would allow him to stay in peace on top of his hill.

Come Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and he made loud noises about the even-handed accountability process he and his government would initiate and follow through. Many were naive enough to believe him. Others refused to accept the even-handed part, but hoped that at least he would finish off Benazir & Co, get one canker out of our system and perhaps, if he was lucky, bring some of the stolen money back into the country. He in turn could be taken care of by the next top-dog to emerge. However, just under two years have passed since Nawaz Sharif was brought back and Benazir Bhutto is still footloose and fancy free.

Come last December 30, and we read about Shahbaz Sharif's declaration : "Although the Sharif family's default was engineered by the PPP government, it would pay every single penny of the state loans of its share even if it had to sell all its assets to clear the liability......... At the same time, he said the government [of Nawaz Sharif] would bring back to Pakistan during the next few months all the [state's and people's] money the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto had siphoned off abroad." (Dawn Dec 31)

What Brother Sharif has not said is that in the first place the Sharif family would not have been able to borrow even five per cent of what they did borrow had Nawaz Sharif not been firstly finance minister of Punjab, then its chief minister, and finally prime minister of the country, in all of which positions he misused his power to borrow what was borrowed, to amass what was earned, and to issue SROs for the particular benefit of his family's businesses. He also failed to say that the siphoning off of state funds by Benazir Bhutto and her family is but a congenital trait. Any book written on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's rule of this country makes this clear. For instance, take 'Friends in High Places' the biography of Clifford Clarke by Frantz and McKean published in the US in 1995: "The first major criminal prosecution by the Justice Department focused on McDonnell Douglas Corporation, the manufacturer of civilian and military aircraft. Prosecutors uncovered evidence that senior executives had paid bribes to a relative of former Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been executed earlier in 1979, and to Bhutto's former chief of staff. The bribes amounted to $ 500,000 for each aircraft bought by Pakistan's national airline."

The aggravating aspect of the plunder is that both sides, his and hers, try to make the people believe that they are squeaky clean and as straight as a die, whereas everyone knows they are as bent as corkscrews and completely storto. It is doubly aggravating when each of them seeks approbation. If they were not working towards the misery of its people, we could perhaps have accepted them as jokes, albeit bad jokes.

On the approbation front, flying to Islamabad a couple of weeks ago I found Naheed Khan ("I will never leave her") sitting next to me on the second leg of the flight, the first having been aborted when after arriving over Islamabad we were told we could not land and were flown back to Karachi for a couple of hours. I was somewhat surprised as before I fell asleep Sharifuddin Pirzada was sitting by my side. When I dozed off, he had swapped seats with Nahid so that he could chat with Benazir Bhutto.

Naheed asked me if I was who I am, and when I replied in the affirmative, she asked my views as to how people generally feel about her Leaderene. Well, I responded, no thinking Pakistani with an honest bone in his body can hold her in anything but contempt after her robbing of the country. Naheed's immediate reaction was the normal 'two wrongs equal one right' theory: has Nawaz Sharif not robbed? Yes, of course, he has. They are both the same, no difference between them. Before she could come up with the other usual question: who has robbed more? I told her. No one knows, but whichever of the two comes first the other runs a mightily close second. I then suggested she go to sleep and let me go back to sleep. When I awoke, Sharifuddin was back in the seat next to me, snoozing.

The misdeeds of both current leaders are known worldwide and the responsible press abroad occasionally comes up with meaty stories about their shenanigans that degrade and destroy the credibility of our country. Its people are the butt of crude mirth at their insistence on electing and re-electing such rulers. The minute we read in our press that either one intends to sue a foreign publication for what has been written, we know that it was the truth, the whole truth.

Last week the 'Washington Times' reported that a State Department official to the United Nations, Richard Sklar, had lumped Pakistan together with Algeria, Cuba, and Syria and referred to all four as "irrational, irresponsible, and reactionary." All that was left for Pakistan to do was to feebly protest, which gets it nowhere.

The robbing has not stopped. Kunwar Idris in his column of December 26 in this paper told us how Liaquat Jatoi and his coalition government had employed, whilst a ban on employment existed, somewhere in the region of 20,000 men in the provincial government and in the local bodies and government-related institutions. All these men paid a high bribe for their jobs. If we estimate the average charge at Rs.1 lakh, this means that Liaquat hauled in some Rs. 200 crores of illicit money.

People must face reality. We have no money, the country is broke, no lender considers us to be creditworthy, State Bank figures are laughed at. The Bank's year-end report makes no sense and has been well-analyzed by this newspaper yesterday in an editorial. When the governor of the State Bank proudly announces that our foreign exchange reserves have risen to $ one billion, he does not tell the people that the remittance applications pending with him for remittances to be legitimately made total some $ 2 billion which he cannot honour. Nor did he tell us that, at any given time, what he has with him by way of reserves is half of what he owes.

When the finance minister tells us that he has collected so many billions of rupees by taxing the people, does he tell us how much he has to pay back by the way of refunds?

This is what was printed in the half-yearly report of Lever Brothers in August last year:

"The current economic scenario of the country, dominated by low foreign currency reserves, is already leading to higher levels of cost inflation. The situation is likely to be exacerbated by both the lack and cost of foreign exchange. There is thus considerable uncertainty as to the prospects for the next six months and much will depend on the ability of the government to manage its foreign exchange requirements and commitments. Substantial increases in financial charges are anticipated resulting from higher costs of foreign exchange. There is therefore greater need for government action to reduce the ever-increasing outstanding balance arising from advance tax, far exceeding tax liabilities. This in turn places an unfair financing charge burden on the shareholder, currently amounting to approximately Rs. 70 million per annum."

The people have to bear the cost of their government's default. But for how long can they continue to bear it? Hunger and poverty forced a starving mother of Faisalabad district to kill her three starving children and then to commit suicide (Dawn Dec 25). There have been food riots in Bannu, electricity riots in Mardan, water riots in Karachi. Each time we speak, I tell Voice of the Government 'Mushahidsaab,' that His Master's Rhetoric, even in the largest of doses, will not be able to quench thirst, fill stomachs, provide power, curb the population explosion, educate the masses, or generate money. He replies with his patently cosmetic Islamabad chuckle which lengthens by the day. Last night it ended wishing me a Happy New Year.