Accountability - a bad joke?

Successive regimes that ruled Pakistan over the past four decades turned accountability into a joke; none realised how this will hurt Pakistan's image and make it ever-more unattractive even for its citizens, let alone foreigners whose investment in the country's economy is now imperative, given the backdrop of massive waste and theft of the national resources.
Ironically, although each regime claimed strengthening accountability (only for its adversaries), how jocular is this claim is proved by the fact that cases of massive corruption, whose investigation began as early as October 1999, are still being "investigated", while those involved therein have repeatedly adored high state offices including that of the President and the Prime Minister.
The change this time is that, despite officially denying the creation of an "Accountability Commission" to oversee the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), PML-N parliamentarians keep hinting about its creation because "NAB has failed to deliver the desired results." Indeed that's so, but the perception of this "failure" is wholly different among the politicians and the public.
While the government believes that by exposing massive frauds committed by the politician-bureaucrat duo, the NAB transgressed the limits of its authority, common Pakistanis believe that NAB did only a ceremonial job of nabbing the fraudsters because (except for a handful) neither the big-wigs involved in mega frauds were convicted, nor was the stolen national wealth retrieved.
Even if you overlook NAB's failure to arrest the committers of frauds that it exposed soon after its creation, it has yet to react to revelations about Pakistanis' investment in recent years in the UAE's real estate sector although, according to Dubai Land Department (DLD), since 2013, Pakistanis have invested AED 24 billion (or $6.54 billion) in emirate's property market.
Disclosures by DLD about Pakistanis' investment in Dubai's real estate sector have gone on for several years, but NAB hasn't reacted to these disclosures. Not surprisingly, the government too did not fault NAB on account of this glaring failure because many Pakistani investors in Dubai's real estate sector are directly or indirectly connected with Pakistan's ruling class.
While obtaining data from Swiss and EU banks on placement of over $200 billion by Pakistanis (as admitted by the Federal Finance Minister) in these institutions is a tough ask, DLD could provide the data on Pakistani investors to segregate investment by Pakistanis residing abroad and Pakistanis residing in Pakistan, to devise a correctly focused strategy for retrieving that wealth.
Given this backdrop, while accountability for flight of capital is unlikely under Pakistan's "democratic" set-ups, accountability for financial misdemeanours in Pakistan too is being overlooked. Those accountable for the questionable manner wherein the PML-N regime paid off the 'circular debt' of the power sector in June 2013 are yet to be questioned, let alone punished for their misconduct.
Two-and-a-half years after this payment, last week the Senate's Standing Committee on Finance grilled the concerned senior officials leading to some shocking revelations about what happened on June 27 and 28, 2013. According to Finance Ministry officials, on June 27, Wapda's summary sent to the ECC seeking its approval for clearing the circular debt was approved the same day.
SBP officials confirmed that on June 28, the Finance Ministry instructed SBP to release funds to Pepco, and according to the additional Secretary Ministry of Water & Power, after receiving a letter from the Finance Ministry the same day, Pepco was immediately authorised to release Rs 341.95 billion to the IPPs. An unusual show of all round efficiency!
Officials of the Auditor General of Pakistan's (AGP) office stated that this fund release was authorised without their office conducting the mandatory pre-payment audit of the accuracy of the liabilities being retired. As such, bypassing the clearance of the payment by the Accountant General of Pakistan Revenue (AGPR) was a very serious administrative lapse.
While the speed with which this huge debt was retired - the ministries of Water & Power and Finance, ECC, SBP, Wapda and Pepco doing their jobs in just two days - is commendable given the tradition of wasteful delays, what is equally condemnable is that none of these state offices ensured that this huge disbursement was pre-audited by the AGP.
The real reason behind this baffling hurry in settling the 'circular debt', it seems, was to "clean" the books of account, but in reality, to report a huge figure of fiscal deficit in 2012-13 - the last year of the PPP regime - because due to the last-minute retirement of this debt, fiscal deficit recorded in 2012-13 touched the level of 8.2 percent of the GDP.
If this debt hadn't been paid off hurriedly, fiscal deficit in 2012-13 would have been 6.05 percent of the GDP. This questionable action served two PML-N aims: firstly, the outgoing PPP regime carried the blame for the shockingly high fiscal deficit and, secondly, it permitted reporting a lower deficit (5.2 percent of the GDP) in 2013-14 - the first year of the PML-N government.
What is worse is that, while those responsible for bypassing the mandatory pre-audit requirement continue to hold high state offices, the AGP who exposed this violation was retired three months prior to his retirement date, and accused, allegedly, of availing benefits in excess of his entitlement, which manifests how the PML-N regime punishes the truth tellers.
To deny the realities, jugglery with figures is the order of the day. On February 25, during the question hour in the National Assembly, the Finance Minister disclosed details of public debt, but for reasons he alone knows, these figures covered the January-December period whereas the requirement is to quote figures for the July-June periods to help comparative analyses.
The advantage he hoped to enjoy (at least temporarily) by side-lining this tradition was to force analysts to spend days in computing past years' comparative figures - tough but not impossible - to check the accuracy of the figures disclosed by him. That said strong doubts surround the accuracy of official figures of public debt and its servicing during the coming years.
Another Pandora's box is the secrecy about the investors in the overly expensive (offering 8.25% p.a. return) Eurobonds floated by the government in September 2015. The Finance Minister's insistence on disclosing these particulars in an "in-camera" session of the parliament suggests that these disclosures may reveal that those who, for years, stole the national wealth have returned a fraction thereof by investing in the Eurobonds.
But that won't be a confidence-building disclosure. Based on the recent revelations about flight of capital, proceeds of the Eurobonds may already be on their way abroad. All we would be left with will be load of repaying this exorbitantly costly debt. Hasn't accountability become a bad joke?