Bangladesh is looking for someone to govern it.
More than 24 hours after the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who had been in power since 2009, the Asian country is without a government.
In addition, there was no parliament on Tuesday, as President Mohammed Shahabuddin dissolved the legislature to facilitate the formation of an interim executive.
In the midst of this power vacuum, The chances of the military taking over the reins of the country are increasingeven if it is temporary.
However, the option of a military government is rejected by the leaders of the protests that have been going on for more than a month and have not stopped.
The visible faces of the student movement that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government have proposed a name that they consider essential for the new executive: That of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, known as the “banker of the poor”.
Advisor to the next government?
“We have decided that around Nobel Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus an interim government will be formed in which he is a senior advisor“Nahid Islam, one of the student leaders, said in a message posted on Facebook, the BBC Bengali service reported.
“We have spoken to Muhammad Yunus and he has agreed to take responsibility for protecting Bangladesh at the request of the students,” the leader said.
A version that was corroborated by the economist himself.
“When students who sacrificed so much ask me to intervene in this difficult time, How can I refuse?“, Yunus said.
The agency Reuters He said the renowned economist will return to his home country “immediately” from Paris (France), where he traveled to undergo “minor surgery” a few days ago.
But who is Yunus and why do students believe his inclusion in the new government is crucial?
Promoter of microcredits
Yunus was born in 1940 in the coastal city of Chittagram in southeastern Bangladesh. He studied economics at the University of Dhaka and also at Vanderbilt University.
In the 1970s, he devised a system of low-value bank loans with low interest rates aimed at less fortunate people so that they could start businesses or ventures that would allow them to progress economically.
The first microcreditsas they are now known, were awarded by the economist to destitute basket weavers in his native Bangladesh, according to the Nobel Prize Committee’s website.
These first loans of US$27 They were received by 42 women from a poor town close to the university where Yunus worked in Bangladesh.
Until then, the beneficiaries had depended on moneylenders and usurers who charged them high interest rates to continue producing their products.
Before Yunus’ microcredits, traditional banks were reluctant to finance people with low incomes and who could not offer some form of collateral.
However, the economist’s idea showed that the beneficiaries were able to repay their loans and that the injection of credit and investment into marginalized sectors translated into “more income and more savings” and, therefore, into a reduction in poverty, especially in rural areas.
“Poverty is an artificial and external imposition on the human being.; it is not innate to human beings. And since it is external, it can be eliminated. It is just a matter of doing it,” the so-called “banker of the poor” once declared.
In 1976, Yunus founded the Grameen Bank (Village Bank in Bengali), an institution focused on providing microcredits to low-income people.
By 1983, Bangladeshi authorities authorized Grameen Bank to operate as a regular bank.
The initiative, according to its supporters, would have helped lift millions of people out of poverty. in Bangladesh and other countries; and has ended up being copied in different countries around the world, including some Latin American countries such as Venezuela.
Yunus’s theories were also applied in the United States, as revealed in 2000 by the country’s then first lady, Hillary Clinton.
The former presidential candidate also said that the famous economist helped introduce microcredit programs in some of the poorest communities in Arkansas, a state that her husband, Bill Clinton, governed before arriving at the White House in 1993.
In 2006 the economist was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
“The poor always pay their loans on time”Yunus has argued.
Fighting with the power
Yunus’ career has not been limited to education, economics and the fight against poverty, as he has previously sought to enter Bangladeshi politics.
In 2007 the “banker of the poor” tried to form a partya decision that did not sit well with the now ex-president Sheikh Hasina.
Once Hasina regained power in 2009, she retaliated against him, according to sources close to the economist.
In December 2010, the then prime minister accused Yunus of treating Grameen Bank as his “personal property” and claimed that he was “sucking the blood of the poor”.
In 2011, the central bank of Bangladesh forced the economist to resign from Grameen Bank, citing his age (he was 73 at the time).
But the retaliation did not stop there, and in 2013 the authorities accused him of tax evasion. This year, a court sentenced him to six months in prison for violating the Asian country’s labor laws.
“The aim was to damage his international reputation”the renowned economist’s defenders denounced on that occasion.
More than a hundred international personalities, including singer Bono and British businessman Richard Branson, came to Yunus’ defence and called on the Bangladeshi authorities to end the persecution. “orchestrated and politically motivated” against him.
Only in June, Yunus and 13 others were indicted on charges of embezzling 252.2 million taka (about US$2 million) from the workers’ welfare fund of a telecommunications company he founded.
Given this background, it is not surprising that Yunus welcomed Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and subsequent flight to neighbouring India.
“It feels like a second Independence Day”he told AFP.
Sheikh Hasina’s government collapsed on Monday after more than a month of protests by the population, particularly young people, against a law that set quotas for assigning jobs in the civil service.
The students considered the law to be discriminatory and called for it to be repealed.
However, the harsh state repression of the demonstrations, which has left around 400 dead, has meant that the aim of the protests was no longer just to achieve the repeal of the law, but also the resignation of the president.
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