I Want to Loot and Plunder: The Cynical View of Pakistan's Civil Services

The headline is deliberately provocative. But it captures an attitude voiced openly in Pakistan for years: that a government post is not a call to public service — it is a license to loot.

The cynicism is not baseless. Transparency International Pakistan's National Corruption Perception Survey for 2010 found that the average Pakistani household paid Rs 10,537 in bribes that year, up from Rs 9,428 in 2009, with the judiciary and land administration topping the list of corrupt sectors. Total petty bribery was estimated at Rs 223 billion. A Gallup Pakistan poll from January 2010 found 62 percent of Pakistanis expected corruption to get worse, not better. On Transparency International's 2010 global index, Pakistan ranked 134th out of 178 countries.

When those are the numbers, the sentiment behind the headline becomes understandable, even if it is corrosive. A young person watching police, customs officers, tax collectors and land officials extract their cut learns a lesson no civics class can undo: rule-following is for the naive, and the system's real rewards flow to those who exploit it. Corruption stops being a scandal and becomes the expected condition — shaping even the aspirations of those considering government work.

But the same surveys that document the despair also point to the way out. Respondents in the 2010 TI survey named the remedies themselves: accountability of public officers, appointments on merit, and adequate salaries. And they pointed to proof that reform works — 87 percent said the motorway police model had reduced corruption and should be extended to all four provinces.

The problem was never that Pakistanis don't know what honest government looks like. It is that too few of them have ever been governed by one. Until accountability is real, the cynical headline will keep writing itself.