It was not an easy thing for a country like Bangladesh to snub the World Bank and retract from its request to finance the construction of the Padma Bridge - the biggest infrastructure project in the country's history. Yet Sheikh Hasina's government held the bull by its horn and literally turned down the World Bank's "conditional offer".
Social psychologists often say that people who are a repository of absolute power, autocratic in nature and surrounded by sycophants, often behave in such ways which belie normal logic. Critics accuse the Bangladesh government and its Prime Minister of being illogical, yet Sheikh Hasina has demonstrated that she is leading a country which has expressed its intent to grow out from the shadows of being at the mercy of mainly western donors and international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF.
It is not easy to break out from an age-old practice, which has over the years become an absolute norm. The tradition of western leaders and institutions calling the shots in the "beneficial" garb of modernising less developed countries has probably been in place since the Bretton Woods days. So an equal and opposite reaction, according to Newton's Third Law of Motion, was imminent. The pulling out of the Asian Development Bank from the project may have been a instant reaction from the self-styled well wishers of the poor people around the world, and the custodians of western modernity, morality and governance skills must be planning a few more blows as they lick their wounds to come to term with the snub meted out to the World Bank.
In a country where the US Ambassador enjoys more powers than he/she would normally do, the diplomatic representatives from the European Union countries offer free advice to the government on what is good and bad, and where a large section of the politicians, policy-makers and other influential people indulge in appeasing foreign governments, rather than engaging in diplomacy on equal terms, the steps taken by the Bangladesh government is undoubtedly a welcome assertion of ones sovereign rights.
One can't rule out the danger of seemingly lack of transparency in the project, as highlighted by some critics and analysts, but that needs to be addressed on a different platter, rather than the World Bank and other international institutions portraying themselves as holier than though. On the contrary, in my career as a journalist for almost two decades, I have seen and felt how the western governments and NGOs often indulge in practising and promoting corrupt practices and wastage in the name of "creative accounting" to further their own interests.
A British charity which works on media and development once put the monthly salary of a project manager in Tanzania as £9,000 as part of "creative accounting", while a person carrying out a similar role in the UK draws only one-third of that amount.
Many western countries, charities, NGOs and financial institutions often are more interested in rewarding their pals and peers by sending them on foreign assignments, often without proper and necessary project expertises, in the developing world. The donors and the allied charities frequently design projects with such "creativity" that they become good sources of earning for foreigners (from the developed world) who are based in the places of project execution, but do not necessarily have the requisite skills.
As Bangladesh makes an emphatic and significant stride to come out from the shadows of a culture of arm-twisting by western donors and international institutions - which can be exemplary to any less development country, one also hopes that the government will underline the importance of transparency so as not to give the "moral custodians of the poor" another chance to pull the proverbial string.
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant.
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com
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