IS it collective amnesia or what? Barely were we rid of the riffraff for 36 months, and now Pakistan is back again in their grip. People, who beyond any reasonable doubt should summarily have been thrown in jail, heavily fined and politically put to pasture, are being allowed to return to power yet again!

With four “democratic” governments to boast, catching the criminally corrupt was surely no brain surgery. Or was it? Accountability was a sham put up by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif pretending to go for each other’s jugular when, in fact, each gave the other a sly wink to bottom out the country’s wealth. Sharif’s ‘Ehtesab’ schlemiel, Saifur Rehman, once confided to me that he carries the floppy of corruption cases by the Benazir-Zardari combo when he returns home from work for mortal fear that the disc may slip, get misplaced or stolen! Probably, the guy went to bed with it, too.

And, of course, what about our clutch of caretaker prime ministers who straddled across, swearing to bring to justice the Bhuttos and Sharifs of this nation, but instead themselves ended up embroiled in corruption, cronyism, nepotism and outright lies themselves. One of them was from the land of the Yankees and had no National Identity Card when he landed in the Land of the Pure. Wagging his finger at us, he pledged to smoke out the corrupt forever! What he left behind was an unabashed trail of acts of nepotism as he boarded the return flight home to Washington DC.

With their days numbered (some 60 days to go, but who knows maybe more?), Musharraf’s National Accountability Bureau, but for its clever name, has dawdled its time in nabbing anyone of note. Except the ex-con Mansurul Haq, and even here, the guys at NAB still can’t figure out where the ex-navy chief has stashed his snitched $50 million! Amazing? Equally searing our minds is how come all our army men are angels, other than Gen Mirza Beg who pocketed the ISI slush funds for FRIENDS, blurring the murky lines between personal and national wealth.

Lest we forget, NAB is doing its little bit by netting small frys such as Mujahid Naqvi, ex-information secretary to AJK, for “embezzlement in the purchase of five fax machines and obtaining Rs290,000 from the Zakat profit fund for medical treatment in a foreign country of his mother, who was never taken there.” And listen to this: he’s charged for possessing real estate that is “incompatible with his known sources of income.”

If this be NAB’s criterion for corruption, then most of our babu community from Grade 4 to 22 would surely be in the clink right now! Let me jump back to the shenanigans of the ministry of works and housing when our expectant prime minister-in-waiting and BB’s apparent heir, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, was its minister. There was a man working for the minister who fixed the rates. If you wanted a house allotted, you had to pay an X amount depending on the desirability of the location in Islamabad. If you wanted a plot allotted in Sector I-8, you had to cough up the fixed rate according to the size of the prized plot. If you wanted a plum posting in Pakistan’s most corrupt department, the PWD — just hold it — instead of the director general of PWD handling such day-to-day matters, the orders came from the top, from the office of the minister!

Fishier still was the result of the secretary of works, Ejaz Malik’s complaint against the factotum’s daylight plunder. Guess what happened? Mr Malik was shown the door and a more malleable secretary put in his place.

Should anyone be above the law? Once, I saw an obscenely loaded Mercedes with its obscenely obvious number plate “Hala One” (or whatever) flouting the “No-Parking” sign in that obscenely ostentatious Parliamentarians Lodge in Islamabad. Maybe, that was Amin Fahim’s designated spot for his showy car. I would like to see him break the law in the US. His car would be towed away at his expense and heaped on him would be a sizable fine.

But who cares in Pakistan?

A fellow from Washington tells me the story of how a Pakistani middleman arranged to bring investors from the US for installing a hydel project in the NWFP when Aftab Sherpao was the chief minister. Negotiations began in full earnest and work was to begin when Sherpao sent an emissary post-haste. The message was short but the commission asked hefty. The Americans were disgusted (US businessmen then were not as greedy as they are today) and scrapped the deal.

The hydel project, if begun, would have brought prosperity to the province, but for the greed of one man in power!

A recent jail inmate, Sherpao is now eyeing the grand Governor House in Peshawar after the October elections. It’s democratic demagoguery that puts the malfeasant back in the saddle in Pakistan.

When will the Americans understand that we have no laws, no system, no honest people to crack corruption? Their harping on democracy in Pakistan is a deformed joke.

In America today, heads rolling is a normal feature. A replay of the French revolution if you will: the sight of a crook, all suited booted being led away by Federal security agents in handcuffs, not to the scaffold, of course, but to jail! Can such a sight ever be witnessed by Pakistanis? Probably never.

James Traficant (D-Ohio), a congressman for 18 years, was recently kicked out of the House of Representatives and sent straight to jail for 8 years on criminal charges of racketeering, fraud and taking illegal gratuities and services in return for performing political favours and misusing his congressional staff.

His list of misdeeds sound familiar to a Pakistani, don’t they? But where’s the justice in our country? Where are our honourable judges? Even when their Supreme Court was attacked by sitting parliamentarians led by Tariq Aziz, did anyone go to jail? Instead men like Tariq Aziz, with all their sleaze, are much in demand by the Punjab Governor-General, Maqbool Butt.

Senator Bob Torricelli (D-New Jersey and a friend of Pakistan) was recently rebuked by his colleagues in the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting illegal contributions in 1996 from a friend who fitted the senator’s office with expensive art, a big-screen TV and stereo. He fitted the senator’s person with costly Italian suits and gifted valuable jewellry to his sister and his former girlfriend.

Torricelli is lucky to get away with only a stern warning this time. If caught again, he’ll be torched! Every night we see this sheepish senator (standing for re-election this fall) come on the TV, apologize with a promise to exercise “better judgment” in future.

Have you ever heard a governor of a province in Pakistan allowing his offspring to go to jail for breaking the law? Well, it happens here in the US. George W. Bush’s niece, Noelle, the daughter of Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, was arrested outside a pharmacy on charges of fraudulently trying to obtain the prescription anti-anxiety drug. Ordered to enter a drug treatment programme, Noelle Bush, 24, was sent to jail last month for violating the court order.

Can you imagine the fate of the policemen who arrest a close relative of a governor or the President of Pakistan?

All I can say is, they’d be toast, as they say in America!