Bureaucracy
under fire
Speaking at a
function to present the assessment and evaluation of the 100-day agenda of the
Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) on his
one day trip to Peshawar on December 14, 2018, Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan
thundered at the provincial health minister to send all those bureaucrats
packing who were unwilling to pursue the agenda of their government. During his
speech, Imran Khan disclosed the reason for his specific focus on the health
ministry. He revealed that during the tenure of the previous PTI government in
KP from 2013 to 2018, two health secretaries in the province in cahoots with
the ‘mafias’ were out to sabotage the agenda of that government to reform the
health sector. Since the PM revealed the names of neither the two civil
servants in question (although this would not be difficult to ascertain by
perusing the previous KP PTI government’s record) nor identified the ‘mafias’
referred to, the allusion cannot be described as other than damaging to the
morale of the civil service and thereby the functioning of the PTI government
itself. Civil servants are not in a position to publicly defend themselves
against any charges, let alone such serious ones emanating from the chief
executive of the country. If there is any weight in the PM’s allegation, there
is an established disciplinary and legal recourse to bring recalcitrant or
defiant civil servants to book. Accusing them on a public occasion amounts to
declaring them guilty without proper charge or opportunity to defend
themselves. This is injustice, compounded by the powerful author of the
accusation. Admittedly, Imran Khan seemed in a militant mood and did not spare
even his own provincial ministers. He threatened them too with dismissal if they
did not maintain the required work discipline and failed to deliver. In a
somewhat lighter vein, he went on to assert that unlike the tenure of the
previous PTI KP government when such ministerial dismissals may have triggered
defections from the relatively precariously placed government in terms of the
provincial Assembly’s arithmetic, this time the provincial government was
comfortably placed and did not fear any such adverse outcome. Imran Khan then
delivered a jibe that many party aspirants were knocking on the door of
ministerial appointments as replacements for those who failed.
The occasion at
which PM Imran Khan delivered his message may have been a party meet, but its
ripples are likely to travel further than perhaps even he realises. The reason
for this is that the civil servants not only in KP but throughout the country
are already under fire from the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Federal
Investigation Agency (FIA) and the courts for alleged wrongdoing during the
tenure of the previous Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government. Some of
the leading civil servants from that time have been picked up and even publicly
humiliated by their arrest and incarceration being splashed all over the media.
The charges against them have not so far (four months down the road from the
change of governments) resulted in any concrete investigation throwing up
clinching evidence of wrongdoing. They therefore languish in a legal limbo.
These developments have only served to reinforce the suspicion that such cases
are related to their perceived loyalty to the Sharifs rather than the actual
charges against them, i.e. that the accountability campaign so beloved of the PTI’s
narrative is politically partisan in nature rather than objective. Whether this
perception is correct or not, PM Imran Khan’s tone and choice of words in
Peshawar are likely to reinforce the trend that has emerged since his
government’s ascent to office of civil servants being hesitant to take decisions
for fear of persecution by NAB, the FIA and/or the courts. What the PM has to
understand is that wholesale accusations against the bureaucracy of political
loyalty to the past PML-N government or charges of corruption have already
eroded the morale of civil servants throughout the country and led to an
invisible decision-making paralysis. Surely this is not in the interests of the
incumbent government. PM Imran Khan and his government must therefore be more
circumspect in throwing such accusations around. If wrongdoing has taken place,
no one would defend the perpetrators. But tarring all civil servants with the
same brush can only damage the functioning of the government itself.
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