NRO beneficiary Asif Zardari. Photograph: AFP

Now that a full bench of the Supreme Court is hearing petitions challenging the legality of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), pundits have gone into prediction overdrive. The end of Zardari, his government, most of Parliament and the bureaucracy is about to come, we are told.

Hang on just a minute.

First, President Zardari should not feel too insecure. As has been pointed out by numerous commentators, the constitution protects the president from prosecution. There is one possibility if the Supreme Court is determined to remove Zardari. They can nullify his ascendancy to the presidency  by declaring the NRO  void and ruling that he would not have become president without this illegal ordinance. This would be a radical move though, even for the most anti-government Supreme Court in the country’s history.

More importantly, very few people going to be kicked out off office and thrown into jail – at least for a very long time. The Supreme Court will take at least a month to hear the petitions against the NRO. Assuming they nullify it, that’s when the judicial logjam begins. Just because the Supreme Court rules against the NRO doesn’t mean that they have declared all its beneficiaries guilty en masse. The thousands of court cases that were ongoing when the NRO was promulgated will be reopened. And our courts, as this piece by Anees Jillani explains, are already overworked. With endless motions and appeals, this drama could last till the National Assembly’s term expires in 2012, or even beyond that.

The only people we’ll be seeing out of government any time soon – and this is if the Supreme Court rules against the NRO and Zardari doesn’t use his presidential pardon – are those who were convicted and had their sentences commuted under the NRO.

Pakistan has lots of important things to worry about – the hundreds of deaths in terrorist attacks this month, complicated relations with the US and India, the separatist movement in Balochistan, an economic crisis that is far from ending. Let’s accord the NRO the importance it deserves in the larger scheme of things.