Maladies of this administration
Monday, 7 September 2009
Shamsher Chowdhury
This government's entire focus on administration is faulty. It is more on sound and fury signifying nothing. It says "arrangements have been made to bring down" prices while in effect the prices are continually going up. The other day I went to the kitchen market in our locality where the prices of nearly all items of daily consumables were shockingly high. On being asked one of the shopkeepers advised me to go the Commerce Minster and buy from his stock.
The scenario with the power generation and meeting power shortages is no different. Of late, the Energy Advisor has been explaining the situation to us, juggling with statistics that this government is otherwise good at. One of the reasons for introducing the "new" time schedule was to, what was explained to us, is "day light saving". I find all that it has done only added some additional miseries for the public with the existing ones. For example where I live the power outages were about five times a day of one hour durations and since the introduction of the day light saving it is now four times a day with a duration of one and half hours. At the same time, I have been talking to a number of parents and guardians who routinely take their children to school in the morning hours; they are simply fed up with the changed time. Today most middle class households don't have or cannot afford any household help hence getting up an hour earlier in the mornings and getting their children ready for schools has merely enhanced their miseries and stress of day-to-day living both for them and the children. About two years back Pakistan experimented with a similar day light saving programme by advancing the time by an hour. I was there and I saw how it backfired.
I have a hunch: that the government is playing games with this business of trials of war crimes and the trial of those involved in the BDR incident. All I can say is that this government is good at is propaganda exercises of all forms and dimensions.
With law and order situation, it is no different. The concerned ministry blames the police, and other law enforcing agencies and then issues stern warnings and directives, just like in the case of traffic jams where talk-show specialists make lofty declarations as to how best to deal with the situations and that is the end of it all.
I hear lofty warnings coming from the highest authority of the government about zero tolerance against corruption. Yet one only has to visit any of the service organisations like BRTA, the DCC, office of the land registration, the NBR so and so forth; nothing has changed. If anything one is subjected to enhanced level of harassments with the rates of kick-backs for each segment of services having gone up. As I said earlier in many of my columns tackling or dealing with high profiled corrupt has been so much politicized that it has lost its relevance and meaning with the people at large.
I keep wondering as to what is this all about Digital Bangladesh? At a time when proponents of the programmes at the planning level are yet to have a clear understanding as to what is at stake? The main instrument of our administration like the bureaucracy or most of our business enterprises are miles away from having computer skills even at the basic or mid levels, with the exception of a few capable of entering the path of Digital Bangladesh. Take the trouble of going round most of our management functionaries. In most places you may find computers but the only purpose these are serving is collecting dust and decorating the rooms. This is yet another specialty of this government: talking big and talking too fast. I do not rule out the possibility of Bangladesh becoming digital at some point of time if other parameters of administration are set right as indicated in the foregoing.
With our level in language skills, particularly English, the key international media it will be hard to achieve the target. The one other impediment that stands in its way is administration's conservative attitude and the mindset with regard to free flow of information. Digital Bangladesh, yes, but I do not see that happening any time soon.
This brief commentary would be incomplete without a few observations about the way our Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducts its business. To me, it all appears to be so distant, archaic and foreign. Its key personnel are non-professionals.
Plato in his Republic said, "Democracy passes into despotism". I often thought that this is what is happening to this government. The element of absolute power has clouded its sense of judgment. It must also come out of this psyche of living in the past. It is high time for the government to be pragmatic and move forward. Indeed we are an emotional people. There is nothing wrong with it except for the fact that we tend to carry it too far that often take us away from real issues on the ground. I have personally experienced it too. To this extent I find this government knowingly or unknowingly misleading and misguiding the people to a make-belief world that does not exist nor will it ever. Slogans, rhetoric combined with all kinds of coercive techniques happen to be the driving force behind this government.
(The writer can be
reached at e-mail: chowdhury.shamsher@yahoo.com)
This government's entire focus on administration is faulty. It is more on sound and fury signifying nothing. It says "arrangements have been made to bring down" prices while in effect the prices are continually going up. The other day I went to the kitchen market in our locality where the prices of nearly all items of daily consumables were shockingly high. On being asked one of the shopkeepers advised me to go the Commerce Minster and buy from his stock.
The scenario with the power generation and meeting power shortages is no different. Of late, the Energy Advisor has been explaining the situation to us, juggling with statistics that this government is otherwise good at. One of the reasons for introducing the "new" time schedule was to, what was explained to us, is "day light saving". I find all that it has done only added some additional miseries for the public with the existing ones. For example where I live the power outages were about five times a day of one hour durations and since the introduction of the day light saving it is now four times a day with a duration of one and half hours. At the same time, I have been talking to a number of parents and guardians who routinely take their children to school in the morning hours; they are simply fed up with the changed time. Today most middle class households don't have or cannot afford any household help hence getting up an hour earlier in the mornings and getting their children ready for schools has merely enhanced their miseries and stress of day-to-day living both for them and the children. About two years back Pakistan experimented with a similar day light saving programme by advancing the time by an hour. I was there and I saw how it backfired.
I have a hunch: that the government is playing games with this business of trials of war crimes and the trial of those involved in the BDR incident. All I can say is that this government is good at is propaganda exercises of all forms and dimensions.
With law and order situation, it is no different. The concerned ministry blames the police, and other law enforcing agencies and then issues stern warnings and directives, just like in the case of traffic jams where talk-show specialists make lofty declarations as to how best to deal with the situations and that is the end of it all.
I hear lofty warnings coming from the highest authority of the government about zero tolerance against corruption. Yet one only has to visit any of the service organisations like BRTA, the DCC, office of the land registration, the NBR so and so forth; nothing has changed. If anything one is subjected to enhanced level of harassments with the rates of kick-backs for each segment of services having gone up. As I said earlier in many of my columns tackling or dealing with high profiled corrupt has been so much politicized that it has lost its relevance and meaning with the people at large.
I keep wondering as to what is this all about Digital Bangladesh? At a time when proponents of the programmes at the planning level are yet to have a clear understanding as to what is at stake? The main instrument of our administration like the bureaucracy or most of our business enterprises are miles away from having computer skills even at the basic or mid levels, with the exception of a few capable of entering the path of Digital Bangladesh. Take the trouble of going round most of our management functionaries. In most places you may find computers but the only purpose these are serving is collecting dust and decorating the rooms. This is yet another specialty of this government: talking big and talking too fast. I do not rule out the possibility of Bangladesh becoming digital at some point of time if other parameters of administration are set right as indicated in the foregoing.
With our level in language skills, particularly English, the key international media it will be hard to achieve the target. The one other impediment that stands in its way is administration's conservative attitude and the mindset with regard to free flow of information. Digital Bangladesh, yes, but I do not see that happening any time soon.
This brief commentary would be incomplete without a few observations about the way our Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducts its business. To me, it all appears to be so distant, archaic and foreign. Its key personnel are non-professionals.
Plato in his Republic said, "Democracy passes into despotism". I often thought that this is what is happening to this government. The element of absolute power has clouded its sense of judgment. It must also come out of this psyche of living in the past. It is high time for the government to be pragmatic and move forward. Indeed we are an emotional people. There is nothing wrong with it except for the fact that we tend to carry it too far that often take us away from real issues on the ground. I have personally experienced it too. To this extent I find this government knowingly or unknowingly misleading and misguiding the people to a make-belief world that does not exist nor will it ever. Slogans, rhetoric combined with all kinds of coercive techniques happen to be the driving force behind this government.
(The writer can be
reached at e-mail: chowdhury.shamsher@yahoo.com)