The National Accountability Bureau is Pakistan’s apex anti-corruption organization. Its duties include the elimination of corruption and recovering the illegally looted money through awareness, prevention, and enforcement. It operates under the National Accountability Ordinance 1999. The institution has its headquarters in Islamabad, with four other regional offices in the provincial capitals and one at Rawalpindi. In the initial years, NAB focused directly on the detection, investigation, and prosecution of white-collar crime. Those prosecuted include politicians, public service officials, and other citizens who were either guilty of gross abuse of power or corruption. However, in 2002, the institution launched the National Anticorruption Strategy (NACS) project. After this, the teams conducted broad-based surveys, studied external models of international anti-corruption agencies, and involved local stakeholders. All pillars of the National Integrity System were studied in detail. Now, NAB is empowered to undertake prevention and awareness in addition to its enforcement functions.
In the hurried realm of political conspiracy and a high-stakes pursuit of justice, the (NAB) embarked on a complex journey, aiming to untie 50 mega-corruption cases involving political figures. However, despite the roar, the outcome has proven to be not that satisfying. Contrary to recovering billions of rupees, the institution is found to spend more than what they were aiming to recover. In terms of recovery, the ultimate result was unsettling. The efforts made by the supervisory body of anti-corruption seem in vain as it was not able to recover even close to 10 billion rupees. But for recoveries, the NAB has spent around 6 billion over the past eight years on the investigation of different cases involving high-profile figures. This is not it; according to some sources, this amount even goes to 27 billion rupees in these years. Only during the case of the Muslim League-N president NAB spent over 1000 million rupees. Other than that, in this case, several top lawyers were hired, and the Supreme Court of Pakistan spent more than 230 hours serving justice. But only in 7 years have all those complaints and cases been proved to be worthless as the president of that party can participate in the upcoming elections of 2024.
The institution received Rs2.23 billion from the government in the 2018-19 budget, followed by Rs4.24 billion in the 2019-20 budget. Then, from 2020 to 21, the budget was Rs5.08 billion. However, they received an additional grant of Rs500 million as well. The government allocated Rs5.13 billion to NAB in the 2021-22 budget, and for the fiscal year 2022-23, the NAB received over Rs5 billion. On average, 95 percent of the accused spent 37 days in NAB custody on physical remand and an additional 130 days on judicial remand in jails. The collective remand duration amounted to 1,650 days, suffering expenses of Rs270 million to the national treasury. Notably, these high-profile individuals collectively experienced 5,900 days of imprisonment in various jails across Pakistan since 2018. In addition, the detainees faced an estimated expenditure of around Rs300 million for the time they spent in jails and court appearances.
My concern is that Pakistan is going through a lot of economic crises. The fuel, sugar, flour, electricity, gas, and water are at their all-time high prices. The country does not even have anything in the treasury to start any new major project such as a dam, industry, safe city, etc. Adding fuel to the fire, due to the ongoing political instability, several automobile and other manufacturing companies have quit and left the country. And no foreign investor is ready to invest their capital in any sector, making the situation even worse. And during all these scenarios, is giving billions of rupees yearly to an institution that is unable to recover huge capital worth it? So, the need of the hour is the requirement of reforms in NAB so that it can perform according to the hopes of Pakistani citizens and prosper in recovering huge amounts (at least more than it spends on its expenditures).
In this regard, Chairman NAB (Lt-Gen (retd) Nazir Ahmed) took a bold step. He aimed to introduce reforms to the institution so that it could be depoliticized in order to make it more accessible to the general public and victims. He also announced that his institution would adopt a victim-driven policy to resolve public issues to deal with NAB officials and corruption scams. A monthly Baithak system from the Lahore region would be introduced. In these events, NAB officers would listen to the issues and complaints of the people and suggest remedies. The chairman also said that in the past, attempts were made to politicize NAB by using it as a tool for political engineering, due to which the institution faced severe criticism. Now, reforms are being introduced to overcome issues to revive its reputation. Additionally, he stressed that NAB would “do brilliant work” to improve Pakistan’s position in the corruption index and that its only aim was to work against corruption and corrupt elements. Also, NAB has played its role in recovering and returning the investments of foreigners from several housing schemes and other projects. Now, only time will tell that either this institution is serious about getting some reforms or the Pakistani citizens have to see billions of their hard-earned rupees go in vain. Moreover, the contract-based people are the real burden on the NAB. So, to reduce the expenses, the institution must take serious action and eradicate them from the payroll. Hopefully, with the current leadership of NAB, it will improve its reputation among the public and prove to be a major, unbreakable wall against corruption, smuggling, tax theft, and other white-collar crimes.
The writer is a Senior Social and Economic Analyst.
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