Something akin to a firestorm erupted on Pakistan’s media recently. The proximate cause was an expose by the New York Times’ Pakistan correspondent on a Karachi-based company called Axact. It turns out that Axact, ostensibly an information technology company, was in the business of selling fake university degrees. Investigations have since revealed that many thousands of degrees, including doctorates, were sold to individuals in far- flung places such as the Middle East and North America.
To add spice to the curry Axact set up, with its ill-gotten proceeds, a large media group called BOL. It spent lavishly on facilities and recruited some of the most prominent journalists from rival media groups by offering them double or triple their previous salaries. But, with its parent company on fire, BOL crashed before take off. Many high profile journalists have left and others are following. The trickle is becoming a flood.
The Axact affair raises several interesting issues. The first of these is why did it take a foreign journalist to break the story? Axact has been selling fake degrees for well over a decade. What were Pakistan’s own investigative agencies doing? It is not plausible that fraud on this scale could have gone unnoticed. And if it was noticed, why was nothing done about it? Sadly, the Pakistani public has become accustomed to a culture in which big crooks can purchase protection while the little ones end up in jail.
Then there is the issue of why some of Pakistan’s topnotch investigative journalists, who joined BOL, failed to ask even elementary questions about the organization’s source of funds. One of them is a star investigative journalist. In his previous job, with the GEO news channel, he would routinely, on every weekday night, break stories about corruption and fraud. Is it plausible that it did not occur to him to investigate the source of funds of his new employer? Especially given that BOL, it is reported, tripled or quadrupled his already substantial salary to entice him away from his former employer. If nothing else this should have been a red flag for that journalist.
Let’s be charitable and assume that he was overcome by a momentary lapse of judgment — the best of us make mistakes. But what then about the many other investigative journalists who were also hired by BOL at multiples of their previous packages? Did it not occur to even one of them to question the source of the seemingly limitless flow of funds into BOL? Or could it be that greed and avarice have a numbing effect on the sensitive nostrils of brilliant journalists who are otherwise able to smell the stench of corruption borne on a distant wind?
There is also a certain bittersweet aspect to this affair. Setting up and managing an organization to conduct fraud on a global scale requires an impressive skill set: Imagination, intelligence, competence, technical knowhow, and cunning. So we know now that Pakistan has talent. The question we need to ask is: Why is this talent so often deployed in the service of evil? Could it be that escalating unemployment has resulted in millions of qualified and talented young people desperately peddling their resumes for jobs that just do not exist? Perhaps the old adage — If you don’t serve God you end up serving Satan — is valid after all. We, as a society, are failing our young people. And unless we act now to fix this we risk seeing more Axacts in the future.
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The writer is the chairman of Mustaqbil Pakistan.
