EDITORIAL: About time NAB (National Accountability Bureau) made “fundamental changes” to its procedures to ensure it does not harass any government servant or public office holder in future. The bureaucracy will no doubt breathe a sigh of relief as the accountability watchdog finalises “six major measures” to protect civil servants from false charges and unnecessary media scrutiny that affect their careers and harm their reputations, often without any proof. And, in most cases, by the time they are able to clear their names, the damage has already been done and their profiles badly damaged.
Indeed, there have been far too many cases where very senior civil servants were not just investigated, but also arrested for months and years without anything proven against them.
Now, once the final touches have been put on the reforms, no anonymous complaints will be entertained, complainants will have to face legal action if charges prove untrue, officers being probed will be referred to as “respondents” instead of “accused”, only complaints involving financial gain will be entertained, details will not be made public till inquiries are complete, and committees of senior federal and provincial secretaries will also be consulted.
This is a very welcome development because NAB was, to a large extent, also responsible for the paralysis that the civil service has come to personify.
Naturally, in an environment when even anonymous complaints can lead to career damaging investigations and arrests, a service already notorious for its lethargy resorts to what it does best, which is pretty much nothing.
That is why once any matter has to go through the civil service machinery, no matter how important for the state and its people, it usually takes its sweet time seeing the light of day.
Yet it’s not just NAB but also the service’s own signature inefficiency that is at the heart of all the delays, so it will be interesting to see how much these changes to NAB’s protocol are able to charge the bureaucracy. Interestingly, though, these reforms were only pushed through after senior bureaucrats met the army chief in Lahore and complained about NAB’s “draconian style” and “harassment” because of which every other secretary was facing one or more inquiries. That promptly led the NAB chairman, Lt-Gen Nazir Ahmad Butt (retd), to hint about the kind of reforms to come.
Yet it would be a shame if the service just marks this as one more win in its own crusade against accountability and goes right back to business as usual. For, just like NAB, the bureaucracy is in desperate need of reforms as well. And its biggest problem is the painfully slow speed of its working. Previously, the service could conveniently play the NAB card and retreat into its shell, even when it was not warranted, but now it will not have that luxury. So, a lot remains to be seen.
It bears nothing that the military has been behind a number of positive initiatives recently. It cracked down on dollar smuggling and restored the strength of the rupee to an extent. Its involvement in SIFC (Special Investment Facilitation Council) finally cleaned the financial grey area between the centre and provinces, and it’s cleaning up NAB as well. It is now for various arms and institutions of the state to keep the ball moving in the right direction.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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