The apex chamber of the country FNCCI will have a new leadership by the time this issue of NUBIZ is in the hands of the readers. Despite last minute efforts from a number of quarters, no consensus could be developed, and there was election held to choose the president. The observers fear that the election may lead to disunity in the country's chamber movement:

That means the new leadership will have the first task to reestablish the unity in the community. And this will be the first test of the capability of the new leadership. Without this achievement, the apex chamber will lose its entire glow and reduce itself to a status of an ordinary vested interest group. Though the objective of developing a total unity is impossible to achieve or will take very long. a workable unity has to be put in place within the first month itself of the election, particularly during the election of the vice presidents and choosing the leaders of the various sub-committees under the Executive Committee. The new president has to follow the concept of assigning one or the other important responsibility to as many of the key persons who belonged to the opposite faction during the election.

In this regard, the new leadership has one very important fact in its favour. There are many individuals who have sided with either of the two factions not because they subscribe to the ideology of the faction concerned or because they are opposed to the ideology of the other. Many such people say, they joined a faction because without belonging to one faction they would have just ceased to exist as business sector leaders. Such persons can easily be adjusted in the new leadership.

As soon as the workable unity is in place, the new leadership in FNCCI has to start preparing a comprehensive document, or at least rewrite the organizational vision, to clarify what it stands for. It is now time that its image of an organization that stands for the business community's interests is changed to the one that strives for the overall economic prosperity of the country through the promotion of private sector initiatives.

The need for such a document has been growing these days as Nepal is fast approaching WTO membership and many a times in the past the FNCCI has taken contradictory stands on various issues, sometimes in line with and sometimes against the principles of WTO. Similar contradictory stands have been taken also on issues like privatization. taxation, corporate governance and social responsibility of business. Without clarity in such issues, the private sector will not have sufficient support of the general people and without such moral support the lobbying function of the apex chamber will be difficult to carry out.

Together with the efforts on the above two lines, the new leadership needs to immediately start the process for making necessary amendment in the organization's statute specifying the position in its Executive Committee that must be filled unanimously as well as the process that should be followed for such unanimity. The initiative on this line can be taken also by an individual who belongs to the faction that lost the election. If nobody takes this initiative now, they will not have the moral ground in future to raise the cries for unity.