Nepali Congress (NC) Vice-president Bimalendra Nidhi has said that qualified individuals meeting all the criteria prescribed by the Constitution have never been appointed at the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA).
Talking to Setopati about the constitutional anti-graft body, he accused the government of looking to recruit individuals who will work for them to fill the current vacancies. "We have set minimum qualification in the Constitution itself about what kind of persons to be made the chief commissioner and commissioners of CIAA. But individuals qualified based on those criteria have yet to be appointed," he stated.
He added that the institution would have been stronger and would have contributed to corruption control and good governance if appointments were made on the basis of criteria set by the Constitution. "The most qualified individual and not those with minimum qualifications should have been appointed no matter which party is in the government. But we could not do that. We can and must improve on that now no matter what has happened until now."
He pointed that the main opposition leader, speaker and other individuals are ex officio member of the Constitutional Council, that recommends constitutional appointments, precisely to stop the government from making arbitrary appointments and added that even the opposition party should not act arbitrarily. "Not allowing the government to make arbitrary appointments in constitutional bodies and not doing so itself is the duty of opposition."
He counted many shortcomings of the CIAA including being used as a government tool to scare the opposition, weak investigation that results in court acquittals and many others, and stressed that appointment of qualified individuals, while not being the panacea to all its ills, may be the first step for reform.
