How many know Adil Gilani? Perhaps, a handful. And why is that? While we love to rant about corruption at every available opportunity; if push comes to shove, we all fall silent except the Zardari government’s factotums. These Smurfs (cartoon pygmies) spring to life; paint golden halos around their leaders to show them as saints and with the same stroke paint Adil Gilani black as sin.
What then is Adil Gilani’s cardinal sin? Well, as chief of Transparency International Pakistan (TIP) he’s like a one man army with a finger in every government pie judging it to be rotten. He researches, analyses and surveys facts and figures before putting the damning results in his annual report sending alarm bells around Pakistan and its foreign donors.
“Listen, we must kill the TIP report from being published this year” advises some flunkey in the Zardari camp expecting yet another big fat F for corruption. “Sure, no problem,” assures the slayer-in-chief.
The Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi committed last July to conduct the NCPS (National Corruption Perception Survey) 2011. Within four months the questionnaire was finalised and ready to be sent out in the field. But the project was shelved and it was alleged that students participating in the survey were threatened.
What poppycock!
To justify their unlawful act of preventing the corruption index from being published, Interior Minister Rehman Malik in an interview last November said that Transparency International Pakistan was a “detective agency” and its officials were “bribing to extract information.” He threatened legal action and even shutting it down. The verbal lynching against Adil Gilani soon spread to the floor of the Sindh Assembly. Leading the mob attack was the screamer-in-chief Sharjeel Memon of the PPP.
If that was not enough, the government then followed up its predator strikes on Adil Gilani through the press. It hoped to see the end of the ‘trouble maker.’ Why did you not hit back to save your name? I ask Gilani. If you were innocent why did you not refute the charges strongly instead of going underground?
Gilani has filed damages suits in the Sindh High Court against several print and broadcast media personnel. He says he has refused to withdraw the suits despite having received threats.
Here’s an oxymoron: while Adil Gilani is being painted as a rogue, the USAID “to the dismay of the PPP government” has appointed the “PPP’s most disliked person” as the chief of the Anti-Fraud Hotline project for a whopping five years, says Adil Gilani. “I will monitor the $7.5 billion Kerry-Lugar aid”!
Will Amin Fahim, Rehman Malik, PM Gilani’s son, and Moonis Elahi, (named in newspaper reports) be prosecuted if found guilty in the NICL scandal? I ask the TIP chief. Aren’t you wasting your time writing letters just as the press is wasting column space on these VIPs when those in charge of accountability are themselves suspect?
“I don’t know. But one thing I am sure of; that the NICL case has been the greatest deterrent against corruption, and more than 10 FIA officers have refused to toe the government agenda…I am sure that this culture of refusing to act on illegal orders is going to spread far and wide in Pakistan.”
Gilani is confident TIP will publish the 2012 report. None dare kill it! Well, let’s see.
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