Refusal of millennium aid to Bangladesh
Omar Khasru
The process of getting aid from international and polygonal agencies has become almost a ritual lately. The multilateral organizations, such as the IMF, World Bank, ADB, etc., set a series of incremental conditions for releasing the funds. The government claims it has done everything to meet the eligibility requirements. The Finance Minister goes into an emotional tantrum at the press briefing, sort of like an unrequited suitor. In an emotion-choked voice, he expresses his frustrations by stating that if these agencies still resort to vacillation, after all he and the government have done to satisfy the insatiable entitlement needs, Bangladesh does not want and will not accept the money. After that bit of histrionics, the government and the minister capitulates and yields to all conditions, some rather impertinent and seemingly brazen. The trade-off is between cold hard cash, that too in foreign exchange, and national honour. The honour is apparently disposable and forfeitable for enhancing the foreign exchange coffers or an opportunity to spend the money on capricious projects of dubious benefit. To paraphrase a common US adage: "Money talks and honour walks." As distasteful as the whole shenanigans might seem and as sordid as the now familiar and repetitious rituals and appeasement on the part of the government might appear, one may equivocate by thinking that a poor country like ours needs all the monetary assistance it can manage. Therefore it is rather bizarre, enigmatic, and inexplicable that the government is forgoing a potent source of foreign aid without much care, concern or any big deal or whimper. Bangladesh has just been excluded again, for the second year in a row, from the list of countries selected for US assistance through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MMC). Twenty-three countries have been selected for targeted US assistance for 2006. The countries eligible for the assistance are Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, East Timor, El Salvador, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Vanuatu. By any objective criteria, Bangladesh is poorer than almost all these countries. However, the MCC board has excluded Bangladesh from the list, citing corruption as the reason. Therein lies the rationale for government inaction and aversion to mitigate or alleviate the situation. It has to do with the total inability or sheer reluctance to control the level of corruption. The government that often walks the extra mile bends over backward and genuflects routinely and regularly to mollify and placate the donor countries and agencies to finagle the foreign aid is oddly and bafflingly mum about the denial of the Millennium funds. The MCC administers the millennium challenge account (MCA), a program launched nearly two years ago to provide additional US aid to needy countries that make progress in three main areas: good governance, investing in people, and promoting economic freedom. The MCC considers 16 policy indicators in selecting countries that are fighting corruption, providing an environment for free and open exchange of ideas, creating a just and equitable legal system, and that invest in health and education. Any objective analysis of Bangladesh's adherence to any of the sensible and lofty criterion would indicate a dismal record and a sorry state of affairs. During an online discussion on the current state of US-Bangladeshi relations on Tuesday, 20 December 2005 John A Gastright, deputy assistant secretary for South Asian Affairs in the US state department, cited corruption as the main reason for the exclusion of Bangladesh from aid recipients. He said that corruption was threatening Bangladesh's survival. "The government should implement its previous commitments to end corruption," he pointed out. Bangladesh has been a record 5-time champion in corruption, according to the now famous and frequent Transparency International reckoning and ranking. Every year the TI report elicits and garners predictable responses from the ruling and the opposition parties. The party in power dismisses it as a mendacious and fabricated and contrived ranking and result of conspiracy hatched by an unfriendly alien organization with opposition party complicity. The opposition party gleefully terms it as a true and justified vilification of the party in power. After a series of charges and countercharges by the two parties, the brouhaha and the hullabaloo dies down until the next report. The banal and customary rites are then repeated again. But nothing substantive, effective or meaningful is ever done to control the escalating corruption. There are very rare, almost nonexistent, instances when any big fish, embroiled in big-time corruption, is ever held accountable and punished. Officials of foreign governments have now learned to treat this country with disdain and contempt in addition to denying aid. That does not seem to bother the people in power anymore. They seem to shrug it off as the price for their right and access to unbridled corruption. The name or honour of the country be damned! Omar Khasru is an administrator at a private university.
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