Needless to say Bangladesh is blessed with great potential to prosper. And more often than not, the leadership fails the country in reaching anywhere near the homegrown goals and expectation of economic advancement. Despite resilience and hard labour to change their fates, Bangladeshis are helplessly witnessing missing opportunities that peoples of other countries such as South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam and even Myanmar have captured and are capturing.
Instead, plundering of national resources, institutionalisation of corruption, bribery, massive extortion, impunity to culprits, dysfunctional public institutions and lack of enforcement of laws proper have all emerged as signs of poor governance. Of course, there is progress on the economic front, but that has happened in anarchic rules of the game. At the very least, the people who desperately want to see prosperity within a generation have reasons to regret that Bangladesh could have attained the take-off stage at a far higher pace, had there been a fair and functional system in place.
On the contrary, there are individuals, who never studied or worked on development, speak only of the spree of development works all around -flyovers but not traffic congestion, rise in number of educated youth but not joblessness, housing boom but not fall in sales, mobile phone penetration but not income erosion for consumerism, industrial expansion but not production loss due to power outage, mushrooming of banks but not scandals in the financial sector, per capita increase but not rising inequality and so on.
Arguably, the most talked-about issue is the pursuit of the middle income country status, which is hardly understandable to the dominant political elements and also in the public domain, where it is often sold for political gains. They have no clue to how the middle income country would look like for the commoners.
In fact, it is the pro-establishment elements which criticise others, including researchers and journalists, for being cynical about development attainments. They may call problems and uncertainties as challenges by using euphemism or pronounce 1,000 million in place of one billion to present a bigger picture. It's like an old, cliché argument - whether the glass is half full or half empty. Of course, from a journalistic point of view, the glass should be seen as half-empty since it was supposed to be full- uninterrupted power supply or rule of law should be the normal course of action in society, not the other way round.
In the face of criticism, the protagonists of the current system claim the country's economic and financial health is not as bad as dissenting views show.
However, in any case, there are concerns. No matter how cleverly one crafts and presents statistics, there is scope for interpretation by each stakeholder and more importantly sufferers' woes can never be remedied by irrelevant positive developments or angry arguments. The world of authoritarian power is not the world of the subaltern people on the ground, not even of those who have hard-earned money for investment in social enterprises.
The youth, who is looking for a job and struggling to find it, is not in a frame of mind to listen to long talks of economic potentials or reforms over the years although failure to exploit potentials or to carry out reforms is a different matter of concern. The entrepreneur, who has failed to get gas connection even after spending millions of taka in setting up industrial unit, can't solve his crisis with the news of possible reserve of 200 trillion cubic feet of gas offshore. There is no such initiative that can generate realistic hope that the country will be able to benefit fully from the Blue Economy in spite of all our pious wishes.
Currently, the country, while trying to enter the next level of development, encounters a two-fold problem: (i) poor governance caused by a halt in reforms and absence of rule of law can no longer support further growth of the economy; and (ii) the informal sector (which include both legal and illegal means of earning and economic activities) is increasingly exhausting the capacity to cope with ad-hoc-ism in economic management.
And when the authorities concerned ignore the real-life problems and focus on non-issues, it is impossible to make progress by overcoming hurdles. Such an approach can not create confidence in the public mind. Not even the beneficiaries of any corrupt system own such a situation at one stage after accumulating wealth. For example, many of those who have earned money through illegal means or bribery are now reportedly buying flats or opening business establishments in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Singapore or Canada.
What is then the cost of corruption and mal-governance? A wholesale national loss is the result as selective individuals may find ways to shift their homes abroad. But the overwhelming majority of the people will have to live in this country which is not being properly taken care of, for making it the best place on earth to live and do business. We fear, lest we continue to miss opportunities, once again.
In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, some may be encouraged by seeing around 6.0 per cent growth notwithstanding all challenges and barriers. But we have failed to measure the loss of growth itself due to mismanagement and poor governance. More alarmingly, we have been confined to the discussion of growth, without focusing on a variety of dimensions of economic advancement that ensure maximum welfare gains for the people. Apart from corruption and economic anarchy, our development has also been constrained by a short-sighted vision- how a visually impaired man perceives an elephant by touching only a part of the huge animal.
The writer is Executive Editor at ICE Business Times. khawaza@gmail.com
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