Famous American politician Henry Adam's observation "practical politics consists of ignoring facts" aptly describes the mindset of most members of the House of Representatives' special inquiry committee on the 2008 Bank Century bailout policy.
Even before starting its cross-examination of central bankers and finance officials directly involved in the decision-making process for the bank rescue, the committee hastily moved last week to recommend a temporary suspension of Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and then Bank Indonesia governor Boediono (now the Vice President).
Certainly, as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rightly asserted in Copenhagen last weekend, not a single article of the 1945 Constitution recognizes the suspension of a vice president. The 2008 State Ministry Law does allow for the suspension of a minister who is a defendant undergoing trial on charges which carry a possible sentence of a minimum five years' imprisonment. But none of these grounds is relevant to Sri Mulyani.
Even though several committee members later toned down the word "recommendation" into simply "a moral appeal", the mere hinting at the possible suspension of Sri Mulyani and Boediono, without first digging deeply into all the facts of the bailout process, only served to reveal the hidden agenda of the political parties sponsoring the inquiry.
Sri Mulyani and Boediono are internationally respected technocrats with clean track records in Indonesia's economic management. Bringing up in public debate the issue of their possible suspension at such an early stage of the inquiry process will only open a game of brinkmanship at the expense of the nation's best interests.
It is quite flabbergasting to observe how irrelevant or sometimes even "fool-hardy" were the commentaries made by most members of the inquiry committee, which only revealed their technical incompetence on banking and financial affairs and their complete ignorance of the self-fulfilling prophecy of panic in the financial market.
Last Wednesday's hearing between the committee and auditors from the Supreme Audit Agency, for example, turned into a political circus and puerile jostling where House members, aware of the TV cameras, shamelessly raised completely irrelevant questions. The state auditors, who had left their more pressing agenda to fulfill the committee's summons, should have felt helplessly disillusioned at having to deal with such raucous politicians.
If the inquiry committee, instead of focusing their attention on banking crimes at Bank Century (now Bank Mutiara) before and after the bailout, continued to accusingly revile the bailout decision without any rational and sensible arguments, it would not only damage its own credibility but also the reputation of the whole House.
Yet more damaging to the future economic management is the adverse impact the House political harassment would have on the capacity and morale of policy decision-making within the government, especially at the central bank and finance ministry.
If politicians could dispute or even attack a policy judgment taken in a good faith and fully in compliance with proper procedures, as stipulated in the laws, no senior officials would in future be willing or have the courage to take any economic or financial decision however urgent or imperative it may be.
The credibility and capacity of our policy decisions in the financial sector is now in such a battered condition, that we are now in a very precarious, off-guard situation.
Let us just hope there will not be strong speculative attacks on the rupiah. Let us pray there will not be banks facing severe liquidity problems within the next few weeks or months because not a single official would dare or have the courage to take any decision to manage such a crisis.