Islamabad: NAB (National Accountability Bureau) Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry called corruption the mother of all evils as it deprives deserving persons of their due rights and contributes to the breakdown of law and order in society and said that NAB was committed to rooting out corruption with “iron hands”. He stated that the organisation’s anti-corruption strategy had yielded excellent results and had achieved a conviction ratio of around 76 percent, which he called an excellent result in matters related to white collar crimes and that these results were recognised by reputed national and international organisations.
Getting down to specifics, he stated that NAB had recovered 50 billion rupees during the present management’s tenure and that the complete amount had been deposited with the national exchequer. He said that NAB had received almost twice as many complaints in the present management’s tenure, which began in 2014 and that this figure was a mark of NAB’s commitment, merit and transparency. He stated that this was achieved through a deep and detailed analysis of the organisation’s previous weaknesses and that a complete overhaul of all pillars of the organisation which included operations, prosecution human resource development, awareness and prevention tactics. And that NAB’s new methods were geared towards maximum efficiency. Elaborating on this, the Chairman said that under the organisation’s current leadership workload and timelines were prescribed for the efficient, effective and expeditious disposal of cases and a maximum limit of 10 months was proscribed for the period between complaints and the filing of references in the Accountability Court.
Speaking more on the methods used to improve NAB’s performance, Chaudhry said the establishment of NAB’s first Forensic Science Lab (FSL) in Islamabad which is equipped with equipment for digital forensics, questioned document examination and fingerprint analysis had greatly enhanced the organisation’s capabilities. He said that NAB has devised a web based Monitoring and Evaluation System (MES) to observe the organisation’s performance in terms of quality and quantity which lead to a day by day improvement in NAB’s performance and that each Investigation Officer’s (IO) performance could be monitored on the Executive Dash Board (EDB) at all levels.
Chaudhry stated that the organisation had started an educational campaign to inform the nation’s youth on the debilitating effects of corruption on society and had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Higher Education Commission (HEC).
The cooperation between these two organisation’s had resulted in the establishment of over 45,000 Character Building Societies educational institutions and that today Pakistan’s youth were more aware of corruption’s ill effects than ever before which was a milestone in the war against corruption. Apart from this NAB has also initiated a nationwide awareness and prevention campaign called “Say No to Corruption” which was also geared towards educating the masses on the corruption issue. The Chairman stated that NAB was mandated to carry out an Awareness and Prevention function against corruption in the pursuit of section 33-c of NAO 1999 and that under its pro-active approach NAB had been engaging different government and non-government organisation’s in the fight against corruption. Furthermore, he said that NAB was a part of 60 prevention committees to identify and suggest means to plug loopholes in the country’s anti-corruption regulatory mechanism.
Chaudhry stated that NAB’s present management had initiated an anti-corruption dialogue with countries belonging to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) with a proposal to set up a SAARC Anti-Corruption Forum and that NAB had hosted a meeting in Islamabad which was attended by anti-corruption authorities from the SAARC nations and an agreement was made regarding the creation of an Anti-Corruption forum. He further stated that NAB’s Apex Anti-Corruption agency was the only organization with which China had signed an MOU to oversee projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and that the two governments were committed to their anti-corruption goals.
The NAB chairman stated that the organisation was committed to eradicate corruption through the adoption of a zero tolerance policy across the board. He commended NAB officers on their honesty and strength of character and said that not even a single rupee of the money recovered by NAB had ever been in an officer’s pocket during the present management’s tenure.
Published in Daily Times, September 18th 2017.
