Pemra chairman earns displeasure for disobeying illegal orders

Ahmad Noorani

ISLAMABAD: While the Supreme Court is all set to take the mega recruitment scandal of present regime on Wednesday, the PPP government has made a failed attempt to pressure the concerned department to confront the apex court by regularizing the services of wrongly inducted more than 365 employees.

The chairman of the authority has refused to obey illegal orders of the task force chairman and has received a ‘letter of displeasure’. The task force’s hidden but rapid operations has deprived hundreds of thousands of educated Pakistan youth of their basic right to get a job on merit.

PPP government has constituted some time back a special task force headed by the Federal Minister for Religious Affairs Syed Khurshid Shah to regularize wrongly inducted employees in different ministries and their attached departments for political gains ahead of the upcoming general elections. A special wing in the Establishment Division has also been constituted to enforce the decisions of this task force which is headed by the division’s joint secretary (administration) is rapidly executing the task force’s agenda setting aside all the rules regulation and legal and codal formalities.

On political consideration and pressures, Pakistan Electronic Media Regularity Authority (Pemra) has inducted more than 365 sons and daughters of elite of the country last year against 119 advertised positions in different cadres mostly on lucrative salaries. Most of the successful candidates had either failed in the written tests or had simply not appeared in the test but given appointments. These successful candidates mostly include sons, daughters, nephews, nieces and close relatives of the federal and provincial ministers and powerful players in present dispensation. The task force of Khurshid Shah was consistently pressuring Pemra to regularize these irregularly inducted staff immediately without waiting the decision of the apex court and be ready to set aside whatever the apex court of the country will say.

However, the present chairman Pemra is trying to ignore the orders of Federal Minister Khursheed Shah to confront the Supreme Court and earning the wrath of the furious PPP’s leadership. After consistent denials of the present chairman, the head of the task force Syed Khurshid Shah went to the extent of issuing ‘letter of displeasure’ to the Chairman Pemra for not obeying his orders which have ratification of federal cabinet. Khurshid Shah, according to sources, himself is under extreme pressure of different members of the cabinet as well as high ups to get regularized all the new recruitees in Pemra in order to ensure future strategic and mechanical control over the important authority. After the scandal surfaced, those who were involved, got approval of the increased posts from Pemra’s controlling authority in its 68th meeting.

A three-member bench of the apex court comprising Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, Justice Mian Saqib Nisar and Justice Ejaz Afzal Khan is taking up the case of irregular appointments in Pemra on December 7 while the case was left over in previous 3 hearings. The major point of the respondents, the victims of the wrong recruitment, is that the only 199 positions were advertised while more than 365 appointments were made and that too without following laid down criteria and rules and regulations.

To many questions of The News regarding illegal appointments, Pemra has always responded that all the positions were filled by following rules and regulations and that no rule was violated.

The task force has so far regulated more than 5,000 temporary, daily wagers and wrongly recruited employees by flouting all the rules. Thousands have been inducted in the loss-making corporations like PIA, Pakistan Railways, SNGPL and others only on political recommendations. The strategy adopted by the Khurshid Shah-led charismatic task force is to induct near and dear ones initially on temporary basis so to create an excuse for setting aside rules. After this step, the Establishment Division sources say, the task force orders the relevant department to confirm/regularize these temporarily or irregularly inducted employees by showing their few months experience as the basis of regularization of their services. Thousands of educated youth of Pakistan have been deprived of their basic right of competing for a job commensurate with their qualification and ability and are roaming on the roads, jobless.