One of the key goals under the Vision 2025 is to reduce corruption in the country. Yet if the just-released Global Competitiveness Index is anything to go by, corruption is ever increasing in Pakistan. Efforts to reduce corruption are conspicuous by absence, and whatever little baby steps exist – such as the Right to Information that can help increase transparency - remain stalled.
The story of Pakistan’s corruption has been well captured in Nadeem Ul-Haq’s recently published book titled “Looking back: how Pakistan became an Asian tiger by 2050”. He flags how crony capitalism is so well entrenched in the country that rules and laws are constantly re-written to legalize corruption.
He asserts that Pakistan’s extractive and corrupt system has become “stable and self-perpetuating”, so much so that while corruption always remains in the air it is never investigated. Nadeem aptly states that “a system based on corruption puts up invisible barriers to entry for new businesses, so as to allow the incumbents to reap huge profits.”
However, corruption isn’t just about business. It is fundamentally a deeply moral issue: freedom. Pakistanis who proudly reminiscence about freedom at midnight (August 14, 1947) would do well to consider that corruption is a bigger threat to Pakistan than India. Corruption eats more dreams, it takes more lives, lops more GDP, keeps more people homeless, and kills more opportunities to grow and succeed than India or any other real or perceived threat has in the last 70 years of Pakistan’s existence.
If the people of this country want to enjoy freedom as they hope to achieve or as their forefathers supposedly dreamt of at the time of partition, then they must start shredding corruption from their day to day individual and collective lives. It would be a failure of rationality if we do not realize that our own freedom and liberty is being curtailed – nay guillotined - by rampant corruption in public and private spheres. Machiavelli was right when he said that often when people act corruptly they think they are maximizing their liberty, but in fact they are shouting “long live our own ruin.”
How does one shred a garment that has become our national dress? The first step is to recognize that corruption has indeed become Pakistan’s national character; it wouldn’t be unfair to say that corruption is in fact our social contract. Because if, for example, 10 people in a society of 100 take bribe, there are 80 who are bribe-givers (and not all of them are helpless souls forced into bribe-giving), and 10 by-standers who sin by silence when they should act or speak.
It would be futile to expect that 200 million plus people would become voluntarily honest overnight, or that the state would wipe the slate clean tomorrow morning. Fixing corruption requires a broad-based strong resolve to roll out checks and balances in the society – and an important part of that push has to come from those who have perhaps the most clout: the youth and the business elite.
However, much like any road to freedom, freedom from the tyranny of corruption is a journey on a long, winding and rocky road that will require sacrifices. There are no short-cuts to freedom!
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