ISLAMABAD: Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Pakistan’s slain first female premier Benazir Bhutto who has had a life storied equally by tragedy and farce, is set to become president for a second time on Saturday. Initially a background character as Bhutto’s consort, Zardari was stained by a bevvy of corruption and other allegations, including absurd kidnapping plots and taking kickbacks lavished on hoards of jewellery.
Despite a reputation as “Mr Ten Percent” the alleged cut he took for rubber-stamping contracts — a sympathy vote propelled him to office when his wife was assassinated in a 2007 bomb and gun attack. Between 2008 and 2013, he ushered in constitutional reforms rolling back presidential powers, and the 68-year-old’s second term will see him steer a largely ceremonial office.
He has spent more than 11 years in jail, a long time even by the standards of Pakistani politicians, with a wheeler-dealer’s talent for bouncing back after scandals. In 2009, the New York Times said he had a knack for “artful dodging” — “manoeuvring himself out of the tight spots he gets himself into”. Newly sworn-in lawmakers were set to vote him in under the terms of a coalition deal brokered after February 8 elections marred by rigging claims.
Under that deal, Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) will take the presidency, while its historic rivals the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party secured the prime minister’s position for Shehbaz Sharif, who was officially sworn in on Monday.
Polo playboy
Zardari was born in 1955 into a land-owning family from the southern province of Sindh. “As a child, I was spoilt by my parents as an only son,” he said in a 2000 interview with the Guardian newspaper. “They indulged my every whim.” He expressed only limited political ambitions as a young man — losing a 1983 local government election. It was his 1987 arranged marriage with PPP leader Benazir Bhutto that earned him a spot in the political limelight. Their union — brokered by Bhutto’s mother — was considered an unlikely pairing for a leader-in-waiting from one of Pakistan’s major political dynasties.
Bhutto was an Oxford and Harvard graduate driven by the desire to oust then-president Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, who forced her father from the prime minister’s office and had him executed. Zardari was a university dropout with a reputation for brawling, partying and romancing women at a private disco in his family home.
On the eve of their wedding, Bhutto’s team issued a formal statement denying he was “a playboy who plays polo by day and frequents discos at night”. Their nuptial celebrations were dubbed the “people’s wedding” — doubling as a political rally in the megacity of Karachi, where a crowd of 100,000 fervently chanted PPP slogans. Initially, Zardari pledged to keep out of politics.
