Two questions still crying out for answers

The four former ministers who offered answers to questions directed at former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra by the National Legislative Assembly have actually damaged Yingluck’s cause rather than helped her.

It shows that leadership and responsibility are utterly lacking among this group of people. It also shows that Yingluck is not a true and decisive leader as we had been led to believe.

There are two pertinent questions to which these four former ministers failed to give clear answers, or used to try to obfuscate the matter:

First, why did the Yingluck government allow corruption to spread so fast and so wide that B700 billion was lost in such a short period of time?

Second, why were traders and exporters totally cut out of the programme? A good commodity-trade policy must involve the government working in tandem with the private sector. Many countries in the West (including the US) do it by signalling for the traders and exporters to give good prices to farmers, then the government directly compensates the buyers with cash. It is as simple as that.

If Yingluck is left untouched by this case, Thailand’s rice policy will be in an even nastier mess than before.

Vint Chavala