The scale and volume of venality have been such that past examples of money making at public expense have paled into insignificance. We are in a brave new world, where our leaders considered stealing on a scale that would lead to wealth which could be comparable to that of the tycoons of countries awash with oil.

But we have now read enough stories of filching and money making to a nauseating point. Perhaps we now want to read about how those already caught in the net are being dealt with, and not about a never-ending net.

An anti-corruption drive has three key phases: investigation, prosecution, and prevention. Next in this chain of events, as every one expects, would be the prosecution of the incarcerated lot, and, hopefully, punishment fitting their crimes for some.

But this can only come if the first phase, investigation, is completed. And we hope for our own sake that we keep our focus on the cases at hand, and do not embark on new ventures.

A challenge that any government faces in dealing with highly publicized corruption suspects is coming up with evidence that can prove the allegations. Investigation is a time consuming affair, particularly if that investigation concerns individuals holding high public office or those with high visibility.

Two essential conditions of investigation of such high value cases are quality and speed. Quality in investigation leads to better results for the prosecution, and respect for due process. Speed in investigation helps justice.

An investigation that straggles over time invariably leads to manipulation and disappearance of evidence and, of course, red faces all around when the much-publicized indictment results in no conviction. My own experience with district anti-corruption committees in two districts in the seventies was exactly such.

Poor quality of investigation, primarily for lack of skilled investigators, and resultant delays affected the cases so badly that the government prosecutors in two major cases affecting two parliamentarians were unsure about bringing them before the court. Hopefully, in the current nationally known cases we can avoid this.

Our anti-corruption campaign has raised public expectations to new heights. With such high value suspects in custody, and daily doses given by the media of their ill gotten wealth, it is time that some transparency in the process was brought in by arraigning them before the court with evidence of their misdeeds.

Delays will only lead to conjecture and speculation, hampering justice and public expectation for anti-graft measures that would prevent recurrence of rapacity of public officials in the future.

This is where our media also need to play their role properly. In the run up to the current campaign the media has served as an echo chamber of public feeling against corruption, which also acted in some ways as endorsement of government actions. But if we want to view this campaign as only the beginning, we have to think beyond the near term anti-corruption measures. This takes us to the next phaseprevention of corruption.

Literature in good governance and combating corruption lists two fundamentalstransparency in government actions, and freedom of information. Both go hand in hand.

Transparency in government actions without freedom of information is meaningless. If I cannot get access to information on what the government or a public official is up to in my backyard, no amount of disclaimer on transparency is any good to me.

Freedom of information is a fundamental precept of democracy, and the mass media is an important purveyor of this information to the public. The commendable role that our media has played in the current anti-corruption drive helped to wield a tremendous amount of public opinion.

This trend can be channeled in the future to demand accurate and investigative journalism that can work as a watchdog to prevent abuse of public office, expose networks of corruption, and act as an outlet for public grievances.

What we can learn from the ongoing corruption saga that is unraveling today is that opacity of government transactions can lead to grand scale plundering of government resources. Lack of information on government contracts and their awards, surreptitious privatization of government property, unexplained public expenditure, and quiet squirreling away of public assets have led us to where we are today. Without an enabling environment for freedom of information, we will continue to face this demon of corruption.

There are three central elements in freedom of information:

• Giving rights to citizens to get information, and enacting appropriate laws to make information available to public.
• Creating organizational capacity to provide information.
• Ensuring a free and capable media to disseminate information.

All three of these are in the government domain, and a government determined to combat corruption should create the enabling environment by implementing all three.

It does not require a law to give right to information to the citizens. In every democratic government this right exists with all other rights. However, this right is valid when the conditions for enabling access to information are available.

This enabling environment comes from making public officials responsible for making the information available to the public. Imagine the powerful impact of availability of information related to services that every government agency provides to the public, how they are accessed, and redresses for public grievance against them.

We not only expect the current campaign to yield results that are commensurate to public expectation, but also to create an environment that would help to deter future occurrences of malfeasance by our public officials and their business cohorts.

Ziauddin Choudhury in a freelance contributor to the Daily Star.