Corruption: Laws Failure
English Essay on "Corruption: Laws Failure" - Compositions on "Corruption: Laws Failure"
In the early nineties a relatively new branch of economics called institutional economics, reached the conclusion that societies that tolerate corruption will find it difficult to promote development. Corruption adds to the cost of doing business and, consequently, reduces the return on invested capital.
This emphasis on looking at the “transaction costs” of doing business in the developing world was in part the result of globalization and the flow of an enormous amount of capital from the developed to the developing world. Much of this capital came from transnational corporations which were engaged in internationalizing the global production system. There was now a requirement that some measures should be developed to ascertain the prevalence of corruption in developing economies.
One such measure was introduced by a non-government organization called Transparency International. The TI, based in Berlin but with chapters in many countries across the globe, including one in Pakistan, began to publish a list every year, ranking countries according to the level of perceived corruption. “Perceived,” since the measure was based on what foreign investors thought about the extent of corruption in the countries in which they were doing business. educationsight.blogspot.com As such, it is not a scientific indicator of corruption but is important since the perceptions on which it is based influence decisions by transnational corporations about the destination of foreign direct investment.
According to the TI, in the mid-nineties Pakistan had the dubious distinction of having become the most corrupt country in the world. The TI’s judgment no doubt contributed to the precipitous decline in foreign direct investment in Pakistan in the late 1990s.
Interestingly, this conclusion was also reached by the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who ‘as once fired by the president (in 1993) on charges of corruption and then removed by the military on the same charge (in 1999). In a report titled “Pakistan 2010 Vision Statement,” this is what the Sharif government’s Planning Commissions had to say “Corruption pervades all three branches of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
The result is that none of the three benches acts as a check on the misfeasance of the other two. The powers to appoint or reward officials are used arbitrarily, public property is handled in a cavalier fashion, the system ignores (and often rewards) financial corruption and the misuse of powers, financial systems have been burdened with unserviceable loans, public lands have been doled out in return for political or financial favours, and publicly controlled institutions are badly managed and respond neither to citizen needs nor to financial imperatives.” This was quite an indictment but the government did little to address the situation described by its Planning Commission. How did Pakistan land in such a situation? Why the external and internal perceptions did had become so negative about the quality of governance in the country? A bit of history will help answer this question.
We do not always recognize that Pakistan inherited a reasonably well functioning legal system from the British at the time of partition. The system had worked reasonably well during the colonial period. The basic needs of many segments of the population were fairly well provided by the government. There was an assurance that people’s lives and properties would be protected. There was an expectation that those who assaulted personal freedoms and property rights would be apprehended and punished.
The courts worked with a reasonable amount of fairness and dispatch. That the citizens were satisfied with the civil service that helped the government perform these functions is suggested by the fact that the state was given the epithet of maibap, mother and father. However, over the years the system was allowed to weaken since the groups that held power were not prepared to be constrained by it.
Pakistan has struggled for a long time with the problem of corruption and a palpable lack of honesty among its public officials. One reason why the country has not been able? To tackle this problem is that there is a remarkable amount of tolerance in society for corrupt behaviour.
Our culture permits it; in fact, at times, it encourages it. Why is the culture so accommodating of corrupt behaviour? I gave one answer to this question in a book on Pakistan published by me three years ago in the United States. In “Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood,” I suggested that our culture expects a person to be a yaraan da yaar - to be a friend of the friend. Being a true friend - or a good relative - may, at times, mean, if not going against the law but then, at least, stepping a bit outside it. It is a riwaj - a well established tradition - to provide favours in the expectation of getting them back in return some time in the future.
This attitude may be alright in private dealings but they wreck havoc when they are transported t the public domain. And they have been transported with a vengeance during most of our history. Although, we tolerate this behaviour our history also tells us that there is a threshold beyond which society becomes restive and demands corrective action. This threshold has been breached on several occasions in Pakistan and when that happened our leaders, under pressure from the people, promised a vigorous cleansing of the system.
But cleansing usually meant adopting a set of rules that applied to the group of people who were believed to be extraordinarily corrupt. It was this type of approach that led to the promulgation of such ordinances as the Public and Representatives Officers Disqualification Act of 149 (PRODA) or the Elective Bodies Disqualification Order of 1959 (EBDO).
The same approach persuaded President Yahya Khan to fire a large number of civil servants - the famous 303 - for helping themselves to the fruits provided by rapid economic growth during the period of Ayub Khan. In a famous public address that came to be known as the “22 families’ speech,” Mahbubul Haq, Ayub Khan’s chief economist, blamed his own government for allowing a handful of industrial and commercial houses to capture the benefit of plentiful growth in the 1960s. The public heard Haq and demanded action and the axe fell on more than 300 civil servants.
Zulfikar Mi Bhutto, Yahya. Khan’s civilian successor, carried out his own bureaucratic bloodletting. He dispensed with hundreds of civil servants this ridding the bureaucracy of some of the people with tarnished reputations. Bhutto’s wrath was also borne by a number of civil servants who had crossed his path during the years he spent as Ayub Khan’s high-profile minister, first of commerce and then of foreign affairs.
But Bhutto went further than just firing civil servants. The Constitution of 1973, of which he was the main author, removed the protections that were given to the civil servants by the two previous constitutions. The 1935 Government of India Act (Pakistan’s Constitution until 156) contained detailed provisions regarding the terms and conditions of civil servants.
The Constitution of 1956 borrowed extensively from the Government of India Act. It was very friendly to the civil servants. It expressly prohibited variation of tenure and conditions of service to the employees disadvantage and provided “the right of appeal against alteration or adverse interpretation of a rule affecting the conditions of service.” The Constitution of 1962 was a bit less generous but continued to offer protection against a “disadvantageous alteration or interpretation of rules affecting terms and conditions of service.”
The Constitution of 1973 did away with these protections, exposing the civil servant to the protections available only within organic law. Bhutto said that the decision to remove constitutional protection that had been available to the civil service for a quarter century in independent Pakistan was taken for good reasons. IL was taken to allow merit to flourish within the bureaucracy while holding the civil servant to be fully accountable to the public at large. Neither objective was achieved. Instead, the civil servant became beholden to the politician which was probably the main purpose behind the approach adopted by Zulfikar Au Bhutto. Starting in 1990, the system’s wrath fell not on the civil servants as it did during the periods of Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Now politicians were singled out for punishment. In that year President Ghulam Ishaq dismissed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on a number of charges that prominently included corruption. The same charges were leveled by President Khan against Nawaz Sharif in 1993 and by President Farooq Leghari against Benazir Bhutto in 1996.
All these draconian actions did little to keep corruption from corroding Pakistan’s social order and from seriously hurting the country’s economy. The reason why this did not happen is not difficult, to find. The firing of corrupt civil servants or of corrupt politicians were sporadic events.
They did not change the cultural and legal environment in which public servants work and perform their duties. Culture is hard to change. To do so requires a great deal of patient labour, including educating pe pie and inculcating in them a different set of values. Laws are somewhat easier to change, particularly when the public demands action which was the case throughout the 1990s.
The first serious attempt to systematically introduce accountability as a check on the working of public servants was made by the interim government that briefly held office in the winter of 1996-97. The Ehtesab Ordinance was promulgated in December 1996 which defined corruption as a culpable offence and created a new set of institutions, including the Ehtesab Commission, to process cases ; against public officials deemed corrupt. The process set in place, with some changes, was adopted by the government of I Nawaz Sharif and was to become the basis of the effort launched by the government of General Musharraf. This effort began soon after the general took office and has continued to then day.
This emphasis on looking at the “transaction costs” of doing business in the developing world was in part the result of globalization and the flow of an enormous amount of capital from the developed to the developing world. Much of this capital came from transnational corporations which were engaged in internationalizing the global production system. There was now a requirement that some measures should be developed to ascertain the prevalence of corruption in developing economies.
One such measure was introduced by a non-government organization called Transparency International. The TI, based in Berlin but with chapters in many countries across the globe, including one in Pakistan, began to publish a list every year, ranking countries according to the level of perceived corruption. “Perceived,” since the measure was based on what foreign investors thought about the extent of corruption in the countries in which they were doing business. educationsight.blogspot.com As such, it is not a scientific indicator of corruption but is important since the perceptions on which it is based influence decisions by transnational corporations about the destination of foreign direct investment.
According to the TI, in the mid-nineties Pakistan had the dubious distinction of having become the most corrupt country in the world. The TI’s judgment no doubt contributed to the precipitous decline in foreign direct investment in Pakistan in the late 1990s.
Interestingly, this conclusion was also reached by the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who ‘as once fired by the president (in 1993) on charges of corruption and then removed by the military on the same charge (in 1999). In a report titled “Pakistan 2010 Vision Statement,” this is what the Sharif government’s Planning Commissions had to say “Corruption pervades all three branches of government: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.
The result is that none of the three benches acts as a check on the misfeasance of the other two. The powers to appoint or reward officials are used arbitrarily, public property is handled in a cavalier fashion, the system ignores (and often rewards) financial corruption and the misuse of powers, financial systems have been burdened with unserviceable loans, public lands have been doled out in return for political or financial favours, and publicly controlled institutions are badly managed and respond neither to citizen needs nor to financial imperatives.” This was quite an indictment but the government did little to address the situation described by its Planning Commission. How did Pakistan land in such a situation? Why the external and internal perceptions did had become so negative about the quality of governance in the country? A bit of history will help answer this question.
We do not always recognize that Pakistan inherited a reasonably well functioning legal system from the British at the time of partition. The system had worked reasonably well during the colonial period. The basic needs of many segments of the population were fairly well provided by the government. There was an assurance that people’s lives and properties would be protected. There was an expectation that those who assaulted personal freedoms and property rights would be apprehended and punished.
The courts worked with a reasonable amount of fairness and dispatch. That the citizens were satisfied with the civil service that helped the government perform these functions is suggested by the fact that the state was given the epithet of maibap, mother and father. However, over the years the system was allowed to weaken since the groups that held power were not prepared to be constrained by it.
Pakistan has struggled for a long time with the problem of corruption and a palpable lack of honesty among its public officials. One reason why the country has not been able? To tackle this problem is that there is a remarkable amount of tolerance in society for corrupt behaviour.
Our culture permits it; in fact, at times, it encourages it. Why is the culture so accommodating of corrupt behaviour? I gave one answer to this question in a book on Pakistan published by me three years ago in the United States. In “Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood,” I suggested that our culture expects a person to be a yaraan da yaar - to be a friend of the friend. Being a true friend - or a good relative - may, at times, mean, if not going against the law but then, at least, stepping a bit outside it. It is a riwaj - a well established tradition - to provide favours in the expectation of getting them back in return some time in the future.
This attitude may be alright in private dealings but they wreck havoc when they are transported t the public domain. And they have been transported with a vengeance during most of our history. Although, we tolerate this behaviour our history also tells us that there is a threshold beyond which society becomes restive and demands corrective action. This threshold has been breached on several occasions in Pakistan and when that happened our leaders, under pressure from the people, promised a vigorous cleansing of the system.
But cleansing usually meant adopting a set of rules that applied to the group of people who were believed to be extraordinarily corrupt. It was this type of approach that led to the promulgation of such ordinances as the Public and Representatives Officers Disqualification Act of 149 (PRODA) or the Elective Bodies Disqualification Order of 1959 (EBDO).
The same approach persuaded President Yahya Khan to fire a large number of civil servants - the famous 303 - for helping themselves to the fruits provided by rapid economic growth during the period of Ayub Khan. In a famous public address that came to be known as the “22 families’ speech,” Mahbubul Haq, Ayub Khan’s chief economist, blamed his own government for allowing a handful of industrial and commercial houses to capture the benefit of plentiful growth in the 1960s. The public heard Haq and demanded action and the axe fell on more than 300 civil servants.
Zulfikar Mi Bhutto, Yahya. Khan’s civilian successor, carried out his own bureaucratic bloodletting. He dispensed with hundreds of civil servants this ridding the bureaucracy of some of the people with tarnished reputations. Bhutto’s wrath was also borne by a number of civil servants who had crossed his path during the years he spent as Ayub Khan’s high-profile minister, first of commerce and then of foreign affairs.
But Bhutto went further than just firing civil servants. The Constitution of 1973, of which he was the main author, removed the protections that were given to the civil servants by the two previous constitutions. The 1935 Government of India Act (Pakistan’s Constitution until 156) contained detailed provisions regarding the terms and conditions of civil servants.
The Constitution of 1956 borrowed extensively from the Government of India Act. It was very friendly to the civil servants. It expressly prohibited variation of tenure and conditions of service to the employees disadvantage and provided “the right of appeal against alteration or adverse interpretation of a rule affecting the conditions of service.” The Constitution of 1962 was a bit less generous but continued to offer protection against a “disadvantageous alteration or interpretation of rules affecting terms and conditions of service.”
The Constitution of 1973 did away with these protections, exposing the civil servant to the protections available only within organic law. Bhutto said that the decision to remove constitutional protection that had been available to the civil service for a quarter century in independent Pakistan was taken for good reasons. IL was taken to allow merit to flourish within the bureaucracy while holding the civil servant to be fully accountable to the public at large. Neither objective was achieved. Instead, the civil servant became beholden to the politician which was probably the main purpose behind the approach adopted by Zulfikar Au Bhutto. Starting in 1990, the system’s wrath fell not on the civil servants as it did during the periods of Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Now politicians were singled out for punishment. In that year President Ghulam Ishaq dismissed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on a number of charges that prominently included corruption. The same charges were leveled by President Khan against Nawaz Sharif in 1993 and by President Farooq Leghari against Benazir Bhutto in 1996.
All these draconian actions did little to keep corruption from corroding Pakistan’s social order and from seriously hurting the country’s economy. The reason why this did not happen is not difficult, to find. The firing of corrupt civil servants or of corrupt politicians were sporadic events.
They did not change the cultural and legal environment in which public servants work and perform their duties. Culture is hard to change. To do so requires a great deal of patient labour, including educating pe pie and inculcating in them a different set of values. Laws are somewhat easier to change, particularly when the public demands action which was the case throughout the 1990s.
The first serious attempt to systematically introduce accountability as a check on the working of public servants was made by the interim government that briefly held office in the winter of 1996-97. The Ehtesab Ordinance was promulgated in December 1996 which defined corruption as a culpable offence and created a new set of institutions, including the Ehtesab Commission, to process cases ; against public officials deemed corrupt. The process set in place, with some changes, was adopted by the government of I Nawaz Sharif and was to become the basis of the effort launched by the government of General Musharraf. This effort began soon after the general took office and has continued to then day.
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