Chief adviser spells out mission to be accomplished

In his inaugural address to the nation on Sunday last after taking over the responsibility of the chief adviser of the interim government, Dr Muhammad Yunus has firmly mentioned the preeminently historic mission he and his team of advisers have embarked on at the request of students. The chief adviser has also outlined the details of tasks ahead in order to bring disciplines in various sectors of national importance. Because politics and economy govern the life of citizens in general, one cannot be developed leaving the other stunted or distorted. In Bangladesh both have long been derailed and decomposed, creating social and cultural discriminations. Quite clearly, the vision of a discrimination-free, exploitation-free, welfare and open society students ---the architects of the mass movement --- have resurrected from the ashes of the nation's dream in 1971 must be translated into reality. That sacred duty of laying the foundation for such a society, the students have bestowed upon the interim government, the chief adviser affirmed, he and his team are pledge-bound to accomplish.

It is a tall order for any government only more so for an interim dispensation. When governance for long 53 years has been marked by all kinds of aberration of democratic principles and the rise of authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy, cleaning the Augean stables proves to be an uphill task. A nexus of corrupt politicians, civil and military bureaucracy has been the main beneficiaries of the creation of national wealth leaving the majority of the people to be satisfied with the trickle-down socio-economic dividends. The exploitative system has been so entrenched over the past few decades that their well-known intrigues for engineering the processes of exploitation such as raising prices irrationally, illegal toll collection, bribery, looting of colossal amounts of money from banks on several pretexts and laundering those abroad were virtually given an institutional form.

Now without addressing some of the more pressing problems infesting people's lives and livelihoods for getting things on track, even the day-to-day governance becomes an impossible proposition. The chief adviser has mentioned some of the steps already taken including the formation of a banking commission and preparation of a white paper on the state of the economy aimed at bringing order in the financial sector. Thus reform to various organisations and institutions has already begun. But here the main constraint is time. Dr Yunus does not mince words here and makes it clear about the minimum reform agenda his government would like to complete. It will certainly require a reasonable tenure even for preparing the ground for creating a liberal, democratic, non-discriminatory, non-communal society.

So the chief adviser has given the people the option to decide how long his government's tenure would be. He is quite aware of the constitutional obligation and intricacy that, after all, it is a political decision that has to be arrived at through political deliberations among different stake-holders. But he also asserts that at no point should there be left any room for undermining the people's sovereignty or, to put it bluntly, allowed to make it a police state. A national consensus on required legislative reforms has to be attained for incorporation as laws into the constitution of the republic prior to the election for whichever political party or parties come to power.