- Making terms extendable shows sloppy thinking
The PTI government badly needs to get opposition support for its changes to the National Accountability Bureau Ordinance, because the changes it made to it to save bureaucrats and businessmen are lapsing. The government has already twice promulgated an ordinance and to do so again would risk having the courts strike down the law. The PTI may also be looking forward to next March, when Senate elections should yield it a majority in that House. If the National Assembly has passed a law by then, passage through the Senate will only be a matter of introducing it. The draft does not just preserve the protections for bureaucrats and businessmen, but also allows the Chairman, Deputy Chairman and Prosecutor General to have their terms extended. This is as naked an attempt as any to gain control over NAB, not that, going by the recent Supreme Court judgment, the government has much need of gaining control.
The idea of preventing any official for having an extendible tenure is to prevent the extending authority from having a lever over him. Even without that lever, it seems, much can be done. If the extension to the present Chairman is meant to prevent the Prime Minister from sullying himself by the required consultation with the Leader of the Opposition, that goes against the spirit of consultation, which requires the PM to ascertain the opinion of the Opposition Leader, no matter how abhorrent the exercise. The PM should remember that this consultation is required by the Constitution in such matters and appointments to the superior judiciary, which he will not be able to amend for the foreseeable future, and will be obliged nonetheless. Meanwhile, he will be discarding an important safeguard. There is also the apparent confusion as to whether it will be possible for the government to extend the tenure of any official without the consultation. After all, the appointing authority is also the extending authority.
The government should also test the amendment by the touchstone of how it will operate if the PTI was to go back in the opposition. While it may feel it can be trusted with the extension power, does it also feel that the opposition can be trusted with it, particularly when it considers these parties to consist of corrupt elements?
