Will the bitter controversy over the presidentship of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry which has moved from the portals of its faction-ridden leaders, to the High Courts of Sindh and Lahore now reach the noisy halls of the National Assembly and the Senate?

If it does, it will only be escalation of the ugly dispute over who should be the president of the apex trade body: the sitting president Riaz Ahmed Tata who has completed a year or Maqsood Ismail, who claims that office by virtue of an agreement reached when Tata was elected president for sharing the office.

Businessmen constantly assert the government is not capable of running large industries or managing big business enterprise which should be left to them. That principle is being accepted and acted on by the government now through its stepped-up privatization after a long fallow period.

Mr Ilyas Ahmad Bilour as president of the FPCCI went to the extent of demanding that all business bodies fully or partly regulated by the government, should be headed by businessmen who alone had the necessary competence to lead such organisations.

But businessmen are not able to manage their own organisational affairs, with or without official assistance or interference, which is sought by one or another faction in the FPCCI from time to time, particularly before its bi-annual elections or after that. And if the government does not act through its Director of Trade Organizations or more senior officials it is accused of passivity or inaction and an abdication of its basic responsibility.

Now many members of the FPCCI want Mr Tata quit as president as he has completed a full year and under the agreement reached after his election he has to hand over the office to Maqsood Ismail. He was earlier reported to have resigned according to the agreement, but now says he had not and wants to complete the two years as his team of backers urge him to do. That has caused a lot of heart-burn among members opposed to him and backing Maqsood Ismail a local man, and that includes former president Ilyas Bilour from NWFP.

The members opposed to Tata want the government to intervene through the Director of Trade Organizations, but the government seems to prefer to leave the issue to the businessmen. If the government intervenes it may be accused of partisanship or siding with one of the parties in a noisy quarrel.

So some of the businessmen want to raise the issue in the National Assembly and the Senate, accuse the government of passivity or inaction where its intervention was really needed. They want to urge the government to order a deep probe into the working of the FPCCI and financial mismanagement there for long in which large figures are often quoted.

Some members argue the allegations of large scale corruption, financial bungling and mismanagement should be probed by an outside agency. For once that should be done and the actual state of affairs in the FPCCI established.

Problems arise within the FPCCI at its top because of its excessive politicization and high cost of election of the president. Because of that top businessmen or industrialists of the country do not seek to head the FPCCI. Instead small businessman become presidents, acquire contacts with top officials like the ministers and the prime minister or president of the country and enjoy the limelight for two years and thereafter hang on as king-makers in the corridors of FPCCI.

The official policy or the roaster prescribed by the government in the 1960s when Ghulam Ishaq Khan was the commerce minister as well as finance minister is behind much of such malaise. The roaster prescribes that each province should be given two terms of two years each in rotation to occupy the presidentship of the FPCCI. Azad Kashmir should also be given one term.

But what has been most of the time is that the persons of Punjab origin doing business in different parts of the country get elected as president. They could be Tariq Sayed and S.M. Muneer who live in Karachi, Raja Abdul Rahman, who lives in Karachi but has his factories in Azad Kashmir as well or Mian Saifullah Piracha from Karachi who lives in Quetta and has his coal mines there. Local businessmen like Ilyas Bilour who got elected from the Frontier province are rare except in the case of Punjab.

When there has been so much de-regulation in the commercial and industrial sectors, this roaster must be scrapped. Otherwise too many little men will get elected to the presidentship of the apex trade body, and the small provinces' real representatives will not get elected. And the FPCCI will remain a stunted body. Marked more for its in-fighting than its economic achievements.

The FPCCI now relies more on receptions to the top or lower officials to get things done instead of conducting proper research and coming up with the rights demands to the government. It is only personal PR most of the time and little or no research for which it does not have the money, it says.

To separate the chaff from the grain among the businessmen India has the Confederation of Indian Industries which has the major industrialists represented on that. In Pakistan, too, there have been talks of such a confederation and even some initial efforts. But the small traders within the FPCCI orbit have defeated such efforts and prevailed to sustain the unhealthy status quo. That must go now and a confederation of Pakistan industries come up and assert itself democratically without the unhealthy roaster for election of presidents. Let the Chambers of Commerce and the FPCCI continue as traders' bodies, while there is a separate chamber of real industrialists.

Before the 12th Saarc summit the confederation of the Indian industries had ordered a proper study of Saarc trade and future prospects. A major recommendation of the study was India should exempt the imports of small Saarc countries from import tariff and said India had little to lose by that. The FPCCI did not order any such study before the Saarc summit and not even now undertaking such a proper study.

Instead hordes of businessmen from Pakistan want to visit India with their families for sight seeing and shopping. And wave after wave of Pakistani businessmen and their families have been going there. And now they complain the Indian High Commission in Islamabad is not issuing visas fast enough. The Indians defend themselves talking of the paucity of staff to issue visas expeditiously.

What the businessmen of Pakistan need instead is to have small groups of businessmen from both sides meet to study various aspects of trade between the two countries and the scope for its rapid expansion.

The FPCCI has been flattering its members by handing over too many export trophies and other awards year after year at its annual function. The time taken truly wearies the non-commercial invitees to the annual function. Some of the awards are for dubious exports and not for genuine trade.

If the FPCCI is divided from time to time the more resourceful All Pakistan Textile Mills Association is not much better.A recent split in APTMA saw Tariq Saigol and some other key members resigning from APTMA's offices.

Instead of the trade bodies conducting their own research and making their own projections of future trade, they rely on government figures which half the time are guess work. The government too does not have enough money and staff to do proper research work and observe the domestic and external markets.

The need for such study is very urgent in this period of globalisation and the WTO mandate. If Pakistan's future lies in larger exports and in the export of the value-added items, extensive research is imperative.

Such research can be conducted by the private sector in collaboration with the government as well which may help keep such bodies on track and become truly productive.

If the issue reaches the Senate and the National Assembly the businessmen should be told some home truths about them. The fact is that if the government has quite many corrupt officials, the ranks of businessmen at their higher levels are not devoid of the very corrupt. But they manage to hush up reports of corruption very quick lest more of them are exposed. The government may even consider issuing a white paper on the state of the trade bodies now.