It has not even been three months since the Gen Z movement, with the main agenda of anti-corruption and good governance, installed former Chief Justice Sushila Karki as the prime minister of an interim election government. In these months, the government has been mired in controversies. News broke on Sunday that Prime Minister Karki’s chief private secretary, Adarsha Kumar Shrestha, had appointed his wife to a PM’s secretariat position. Previously, the interim government courted controversy over minister selection. The government also drew harsh criticism after Sabita Bhandari, who was appointed as the Attorney General by the Karki government. Misusing her office, Bhandari had decided not to prosecute Hope Fertility and Diagnostic Pvt Ltd, which had been accused of extracting eggs from 16–17-year-old girls without their guardians’ consent and selling them. She was a shareholder in the company, and she dropped the case despite this direct clash of interests.

It seems that the government—formed in line with the spirit of the Gen Z movement—has strayed off course. Nepotism and cronyism have been rampant in Nepali domestic politics for decades. Members of political families routinely got ministerial berths. Even in the previous Oli government, Arzu Rana Deuba, the wife of Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba, was appointed as the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Dawa Futi Sherpa, the daughter of the late Ang Tshering Sherpa (owner of the Yeti Group, which had close ties to Oli), was appointed to an ambassadorial position. The public frustration over the normalisation of such practices was a big factor behind the September Gen Z uprising. And now, we are forced to ask: How is this government any different to the nepotist and cronyist governments of the past?

Again, the legitimacy of the interim government lies in its ability to deliver on the mandate of the Gen Z movement and its capacity to carry the agendas of anti-corruption and good governance. With the Attorney General’s apparent misuse of power and the lack of any action against her, the government has shown that it has no intention of holding governmental figures accountable. The nepotism of the PM’s chief private secretary and the ensuing toothless defence of the appointment also gives a poor account of a government composed of figures of supposedly impeccable credentials.

It is still not too late to rectify the mistakes. For one, the clarification published by the PM’s secretariat defending the controversial appointment to her secretariat is not the right way forward. The excuse that PM Karki, ‘owing to their advanced age, has selected a reliable person who can provide timely support’ is lame; the PM’s private secretariat must publish the merit basis, if there is any, on which such appointments were made. If not, the appointments must be revoked. Similarly, Attorney General Bhandari should, at the very least, face an investigation into her questionable conduct.

The Karki government, while it behaves like previous governments, must face some hard facts: One, the very legitimacy of the unelected government comes from the fact that people trust its members to be clean and uncorruptible. Two, the public is not the same as before either. As shown by the Gen Z Front’s demand for the removal of chief private secretary Shrestha, the citizens, especially the Gen Z-ers, are closely following each and every government action. They are demanding a change to the old ways of doing things. The ball is in the government’s court. Can the interim government resurrect its sullied image on time, or is more infamy in store for its members, especially Prime Minister Karki and her cabinet?