Economic inequities and political frailties
A national stand is imperative
Hafeejul Alam
While the market manipulation, the unrest in the RMG and other industrial sectors, and the mismanagement of the economy as a whole is upsetting the nation , the northern region is beset with severe 'monga' or famine. However, it appears that an ostrich policy is reigning everywhere and that there is none to look after the endless glitches. On the other hand ( thanks both to the electronic and the print media), we are kept abreast of the grandiose state Iftar parties and dinners almost every evening, of course at the cost the tax-payers money! It looks as if we have a government by the people, for the elite and of the elite! As ill luck would have it, the so called elites are also the role models of our society wielding the real state power and again they misuse that power rather ruthlessly, causing thereby a virtual breakdown of the socio-economic order. It seems that no one is there to think about the hapless people, who live as if in another world not affected by the awful inflation and exploitation, need not go for shopping against sky-high price-rise, and who are but outcasts in a crude and rude society. Pertinently, it may be worthwhile to quote a few lines from the recently published famous best-seller "Living History" where Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote: " Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on earth, presented the starkest contrast of wealth and poverty I saw in South Asia....Here, the authorities made no effort to the destitute behind brightly coloured cloth." The real problem in Bangladesh is not that we have too many poor but that our governments have been awfully rich , rather too rich to understand the pangs of the poor. Had it not been so, the national budgets couldn't prescribe every possible means to make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. Continuous regressive taxation has made Bangladesh a country of cruel contradictions. Probably, it is the only country in the world where the poor are compelled to pay for the well being of the rich, where the infant food items are made relatively dearer than the diamonds and drinks, where junior employees in the private sector are made to pay income-tax but the big bureaucrats in the public sector are exempt from that and where the establishment remains stark silent over the collusion of the business elites and the bureaucrats, plundering billions from the national exchequer through blatant corruption, "system loss", tax evasion, fictitious books of accounts, under-the-table dealings, and many other guise. Again it is the only country where the rich people become bank-defaulters by billions and remain unscathed, but the poor women in the remote villages rearing cows or goats or doing some handicrafts are put under obligation to pay high interests on their small loans and there are many more such heart-rending instances. Thus Mrs. Hillary's comments have been proved beyond any doubt by the barefaced policy of appeasing the affluent and preaching austerity for the deprived. A novel social justice indeed! We are told that the garments sector is the major forex earner, but if one visits a garment factory at Dhaka, Narayanganj or Chittagong, he or she would find hundreds of skeletal young girls working day and night with unbelievably paltry wages of Tk.800 or so per month with no other benefits, sometimes not even festival bonus. It is really lamentable that even after three decades of our independence, the successive governments could not prescribe even a subsistence-level minimum wages for our workers. They die or get hurt in the street because of their genuine demands of minimum subsistence wage, Eid-bonus, and eight hours-a-day working period. In the man-power export sector, which is regarded as the highest contributor to the national exchequer ( more than 3 billion US $ per year) in terms of remittance from the hard-earned wage earners, an unskilled poor worker has to spend Tk. 100,000 to Tk. 150,000 (whereas the actual cost should by no means exceed Tk. 25,000 ) for getting a job in the Gulf countries which can hardly fetch him Tk. 5000to Tk 6000 pm. In sharp contrast to other South Asian countries, our governments miserably failed not only to control the limitless lusts of a section of our manpower exporters, but also to negotiate a better deal with the Gulf countries. In the public sector, the situation is even worse. Billions are being looted in the name of system losses and at the cost of strained tax-payers. These are only a few amidst the vast sea of exploitation and inequality which are breaking the backbone of this nascent nation. In the national context, it is not important which political party comes to power or which one leaves it, but it is absolutely important to contain the sizzling state of affairs. It is a pity that the leaderships of the major political parties are dependent almost totally not upon their own abilities, but upon the legacy of the kindred celebrities who are no more in this world. For Bangladesh, it has almost become a craze to support or not to support a political party on the basis of one's acceptability of the deceased leaders instead of the living ones. Here lies the Achilles' heel of our polity. No wonder, Frederick T. Temple, the former World Bank Representative in Bangladesh once so aptly pin-pointed two basic weaknesses of our democratic system. He pointed out that our political parties do not follow the democratic system themselves and that only the very rich people can get elected in the parliament. It may be relevant to mention here a statistical fact that more than 80 percent of our members of parliament are from the rich business community. It is a disgrace that our political system could not yet devise any procedure by which honest professionals, intellectuals, and dedicated leaders could find their way in the parliament and speak for the people. If the parliament consists of only the rich entrepreneurs, it would better serve as a chamber of commerce and industry as opposed to a parliament. One may be amazed to find out that the successive national budgets reflect nothing but the hopes and aspirations of the chamber bodies in contrast to those of the vast spectrum of professionals and people. In the backdrop of such a state of affairs, no one can expect that Bangladesh would be able to face the challenge of the new millennium unless immediate steps are taken to stave off the stark inequities in the economy and bleak frailties in the polity. If our total economic planning is not made people-oriented and if the state is run as a business establishment caring only for the profit and loss statement rather than for the social statement, the things may rapidly go out of control. Just calling the armed forces and apprehending a few criminals or frequently reshuffling the police force would not change the chaotic scenario at all, as we have seen before that such cursory actions result in further messing up of the problem, instead of unraveling the same. It is high time that the major political parties including the government take a national stand to get rid of the endless malfunctions, and go for necessary constitutional provisions, so that the independence of judiciary and setting up of an independent anti-corruption body are ensured, members of the parliament can speak and vote freely in the interest of the people rather than of a particular party, and people can evaluate the performance of the government every three years instead of five long years, through a system of free and fair election where only the voice of the people shall reign, not the money or the muscle. Hafeejul Alam is a management specialist
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