EDITORIAL: The drama about the fire at the Federal Board of Revenue's (FBR's) Faisalabad office, when employees who had been stealing and selling seized cigarettes tried to burn all the evidence and reduced a whole office block to ashes in the process, would be comical if it weren't so incredibly tragic. It goes to show just how deep-rooted the culture of corruption has become in our society, especially in government offices and to what lengths the corrupt will go in order to cover their tracks. It turns out that a few workers at the FBR office had worked out a scheme, in collusion with colleagues of course, to sell seized imported cigarettes on the side and make easy money for everybody. And when they had sold stolen cigarettes to the tune of Rs1.5 million and decided to get rid of the evidence, they simply switched off the cameras and set fire to the additional block, where they were kept. It's only that they missed one camera and just when everybody thought the fire was caused by a short-circuit the police caught on to the lead and got to the bottom of the whole business. Otherwise, that would have been the end of the matter.
Government departments can investigate such incidents all they want but when time comes for formulating policies to unearth and control corruption everybody draws a blank for rather obvious reasons. How, really, do you even begin to do something about corruption when it has seeped into every nook and corner of society? It is no secret that literally every government department is littered with leeches that have been sucking the blood out of the system and the people since forever. The situation is only marginally better in the private sector that too only because profit and loss are the only languages they speak there, which is why they have far stronger and better control and oversight mechanisms. But that is not to say, obviously, that such problems do not exist outside the public sector. It's just that the tendency to throw one's weight around is much higher in government offices because people there sit on much more powerful seats. And in a society where corruption is neither checked nor properly punished or even really frowned upon anymore, it is only natural for people to exploit their positions in whichever ways they can. Ask anybody with an electricity breakdown how much greasing the palm of the lineman helps in terms of actually overcoming the main problem to get a better idea of how things are really done in this Islamic republic.
This PTI government has made a great deal about the need for a thorough overhaul in government departments to overcome problems precisely like corruption. But so far it has not been able to back its promises with any form of concrete action or even much movement in the right direction. There is no denying that its thinking is correct, but perhaps incidents like the FBR office fire will force it to design a better response mechanism; one which enables quick investigation and punishment wherever corruption is caught so at least a start can be made with effective deterrence. As more and more people know of the severe consequences of using public property or funds for personal benefit, fewer will be inclined to take the risk.
But that too is easier said than done. A problem that often arises in such matters is that when you form committees to carry out such cleansing, there's never really any way of knowing if some of the chosen few have also not been eating off the fat of the land all this time and therefore might be inclined to protect their kind. And it's little use, in the existing system, of just going after them considering the endless legal and procedural delaying tactics available to them, which will ensure that at the very least the cases against them go on forever. So nothing less than a thorough overhaul will be needed whenever the government really intends to take this matter up. It's just that such adventures usually rub the civil service the wrong way and no government likes or can afford such friction less than half way through its tenure. Only time will tell how long we will have to move from one such incident to another before finally some government puts its foot down and does something about it, regardless of how long or painful the process might be.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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