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Prime Minister Gilani is a man of many words and few actions. The PM to his credit or discredit readers can chooise, is always suited and booted and oozes class whilst his performance in Parliament and elsewhere is full of proud rhetoric and promises galore. However his words have yet to materialise into action with Gilani’s governance as the chief executive of Pakistan being pitiful and pathetic.

The Ejaz Hussain Jhakrani health scandal is the most recent example of Gilani’s governance where as Prime Minister he has decided against sacking an allegedly corrupt cabinet minister who is accused of blatantly being engaged in corruption whilst running the Health Minisry.

Jhakrani’s list of achievements and they must be achievements as the PM has chose to retain him including fleecing drug companies, misleading the Lahore High Court and UNICEF and worst of all putting at risk the lives of millions of poor and already unhealthy children for the pursuit of personal profit according to an investigative report by Kamran Khan. And how does the PM react to such planned and deliberate evil?, he moves Jakhrani to the Sports Ministry and so three cheers for the PM and his good governance!

The respected journalist, Kamran Khan writing in The News has published an investigative report into the health scandal and it is shared below:

Mighty Protection for Corruption-Plagued Health Ministry

When Makhdoom Shahabuddin suddenly replaced Ejaz Hussain Jhakrani as the federal health minister last month and terminated the services of Dr Suresh Kumar, the drugs controller, Ministry of Health, on the very first day in office, no official explanation was provided for this tumult in the ministry whose actions affect the life of every Pakistani.

An investigation by this correspondent has revealed that a decision to quickly dispatch Jhakrani from an all-important Health Ministry to the least important Sports Ministry and simultaneous sacking of the drugs controller was ordered when Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was flooded with information on record-breaking corruption in the Ministry of Health.

The prime minister was told that thousands of new drugs were being registered at a supersonic speed at the expense of the local pharmaceutical industry, select few companies were getting the much-needed price revision for their products, and procurements for various programmes of national health funded with billions of rupees of taxpayers’ money were being made on the basis other than transparency, fair play and best value for money.

Specific examples are available to prove that the companies, who had established relationship at the top level of the Ministry of Health, got their new products registered, in some cases within a few weeks, while many others following the prescribed route were made to wait for months and in few cases, over a year.

“On the face of it, the drugs registration process officially travels from bottom to top, but in actual, it was the other way round. There was a price even to get your case included in the agenda of the registration board,” said an executive with a well-known pharmaceutical company, who made secret recordings of his negotiations with important Health Ministry officials for the registration of some new products. The recordings showed that a sum of Rs 0.5 million changed hands at various levels for each of the four products registered by the same company last year.

The scale of money involved in the process can be gauged from the fact, officially confirmed by the Ministry of Health, that some 4,000 new products were registered in the past 18 months. A massive depreciation of rupee against the US dollar last year forced a scramble by hundreds of local and multinational pharmaceutical companies, wholly dependent on import of raw material and finished products, to seek a price revision for their products from the Ministry of Health. A list of pharmaceutical companies, lucky enough to get the prices of their products revised, some substantially than others, by pressing the right buttons at the ministry showed that a flimsy formula was twisted to adjust the chosen few. Specific cases of price revision showed that imported vaccines and medicines of same formulae received different treatment.

The situation, due to an appreciation of the US dollar against the Pak rupee, forced even some of the multinational companies to play to the tunes of masters at the Health Ministry. “Even a passing examination of each of the product that got registered and those received price increase in the year 2008 and last year and informal questioning of relevant staff in the ministry will unfold the whole scam,” claimed a senior Health Ministry insider.

The same source and other informed industry sources relate corruption in the registration and related matters at the Health Ministry to Minister Jhakrani’s decision, soon after taking over as Minister for Health, to induct Dr Suresh Kumar into the Health Ministry as the drugs controller. Kumar was earlier serving at a laboratory, run by the Sindh Health Ministry.

But rampant corruption in the Ministry of Health was not restricted to the issues of registration and pricing of pharmaceutical products, the prime minister had been informed of massive corruption in tens of billions of rupees worth national health programmes such as the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI); National Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health (MNCH); Malaria Control Programme and Hepatitis Control Programme.

In most cases, unqualified, least experienced but politically-connected people were handpicked in the later half of 2008 to run the above-mentioned about Rs 30 billion health programmes of national importance. These programme managers were also being hurriedly changed by the new health minister, though without ordering a formal probe into the misdeeds that impacted almost every Pakistani’s life in the past two years.

The most controversial, however, remained the EPI, the national health programme aimed at protecting children by immunising them against childhood tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and tetanus.

The children have not been getting the best value for the tax payers’ money for the last two years when the Ministry of Health abandoned a cheaper and much better procurement of vaccines through Unicef in favour of local suppliers of vaccines, including a supplier, who monopolises the supply of critically important measles vaccines.

The procurement of vaccines and other products for the Rs 12 billion EPI programme from the world recognised and cheaper supply chain of Unicef was abandoned by the Ministry of Health ostensibly under an uncontested submission by senior health officials before the Lahore High Court, Rawalpindi bench, pledging to discontinue the purchase from Unicef and initiate local purchase, without informing the court that this would cost more to the children of Pakistan in terms of quality, quantity and above all, the price.

Documents revealing how rules and regulations were tempered with from the most important procurement of vaccines to the printing of material for the EPI programme illustrate how local as well as multinational pharmaceutical companies influenced decision-making from the programme manager to all the upper bureaucratic levels at the Ministry of Health. Jhakrani has been relocated to the Sports Ministry and former drugs controller Suresh Kumar has been sacked, but like all other cases of alleged mega corruption, the perpetrators continue to enjoy immunity against any action.

The Kamran Khan investigation is damning whilst Gilani’s actions and the lack of them equally so. Moreover Gilani’s actions are not even befitting a Prime Minister of a banana republic and provides ample proof that the PM is impotent to act against corruption especially if the accused are fellow PPP men.

What makes it worse is that the PM has at times shown some steel in dealing with poor governance and corruption allegations not least in asking for the resignation of Latif Khosa as Attorney General. However it seem that the PM is a walking talking hypocrite and full of contradictions as he has later appointed the same Khosa as his advisor and promoted Babar Awan who too was accused of corrption in the Harris Steel case as the Law Minister.

An editorial on the scandal published in The News sums ups Gilani’s ‘good governance’ well and it is shared below:

Corrupt and Guilty

Were we to seek a reference point as to just how far our moral compass has degraded we need only look at the workings of the ministry of health under the current government. There were sudden changes at the top of the ministry last December – and now we know why. Makhdoom Shahabuddin replaced Ejaz Hussain Jakhrani as the federal health minister, and the services of Dr Suresh Kumar, who was the drugs controller at the MoH, were terminated on the day the new minister took up his post. Why such expeditious action? Because the office of the prime minister had received a swathe of information about the mind-boggling levels of corruption within the MoH that surpassed even the high levels of tolerance for corruption that lies in every government office and department. The MoH is a ministry that has an impact, somewhere in their lives, on every man, woman and child in the nation. It was being systematically milked by the sacked officials since the day of their appointment. It was not a culture that grew with time, it was operant from the day they took over their new office and started giving orders. They went into their jobs with the clear intention of fleecing the drug companies and defrauding the people they were there to serve. Their intentions were criminal from the outset – and they will almost certainly escape prosecution, or even an in-depth investigation.

These two men and their willing accomplices in the MoH stand as the new benchmark for shame and degradation in public service. Perhaps the most disgusting of their scams relates to the EPI programme, the programme that ensures that newborns receive inoculation against childhood tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and tetanus. These leeches deceived the Lahore High Court’s Rawalpindi Bench into discontinuing the purchase of vaccines through the UNICEF programme, in favour of a local company that was selling the drugs at a higher rate than that given by UNICEF. What could be more heartless? Where was the concern or sense of responsibility towards the tiniest and most helpless of our citizens, the babies? There was none. All they were concerned about was lining their own pockets, and those of their political allies and friends, all of whom profited as they did. Those who took the filthy profit are as guilty as the men who engineered the opportunity to make it. Perhaps a small comfort may be derived from the fact that they are now out of office and their cronies likely to be so imminently. Some comfort also that when the scandal was exposed the prime minister moved to do something about it. But the damage is done; it will take long to repair, and the guilty – and guilty they are, trial, or no trial – slip into the margins safe and sound with the money in their bank accounts. Such is the nature of public service here in the Land of the Pure, and the failure of these individuals’ moral compass taints us all.

The Prime Minister is equally responsible for the health scandal by way of acts of ommission in not sacking Jhakrani and not ordering an enquiry into the corruption allegations for which if proved then leeches like Jhakrani and the PM must pay a heavy price. The Prime Minister is left diminished and degraded by his actions or the lack thereof and has brought shame upon himself and his esteemed office.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 @ 5:39 pm on the category Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.