The ToR tangle

Continued rancour on ToRs and further delays in setting up an inquiry will greatly harm the country

Nobody had expected the 12-member parliamentary committee constituted to formulate the terms of reference (ToRs) for an inquiry commission that would investigate the Panama affair to immediately develop consensus on how to proceed. In fact, considering the wide gap that exists between the positions taken by the government and the nine-party opposition alliance on the issue, nobody had even expected the two sides to agree, in the first place, to join hands for writing an agreed set of ToRs. However, the forming of the committee does not mean that the outcome of the deliberations would also be ideal just because the unexpected has happened and the two sides have also agreed on a timeframe of two weeks for completing their job. When two parties negotiate, it is only through a give-and-take approach that they can reach an agreement. And while this process is going on, it is only to be expected that the two sides would try to influence public opinion through media manipulation to bring the needed pressure on the other side to accept each other’s respective trade-off formula.

That is what perhaps the government tried to do when its representatives informed the media that the opposition had agreed to exclude from the proposed ToRs the name of the prime minister, and the perks and privileges which his family had received during its stay in Saudi Arabia. And it was only expected that the opposition would hit back. And it did. It would only be in the interest of the two sides not to leak out-of-context sensational crumbs of the deliberations that have taken place to the media. It would also be advisable to focus on the irreducible minimum, which is to deal first with the money trail that led to the first purchase in the early 1990s of the London apartments owned by the prime minister’s family. After having established this, the scope of the probe could be extended to loan defaulters and those who are accused of transferring money earned through corruption and kickbacks. We would want to call on both sides to conduct these discussions in good faith. Continued rancour on the ToRs and further delays in setting up an inquiry would greatly harm the country, and particularly the ruling party itself.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29^th, 2016.

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