Better late...

The prime minister has been very judicious to ask Mir Nasiruddin to step down, after his disappointing failure to resolve the yearly Hajj flight issue. The minister was always a poor performer with hardly any performance including in his own constituency. We thank the PM for her wise decision.

The PM should have acted earlier after the debacle in the Chittagong mayoral election.

The donors, WB, ADB, our well-wishers and some of the opposition parties expressed serious resentment regarding the Herculean size of the BNP-Jama'at cabinet, a burden on the poor tax payers. The huge amount of hard cash spent to maintain the world's biggest cabinet comes from the funds allocated for expenses in connection with governance. It is never helpful to the common man. Only a small amount is allocated for 'development' and the main share of it comes from donors. The donors or foreign agencies were not always accurate and our government in most cases, "publicly" deplored or discarded the didactics. But we (lay men) know for certain that they rightly criticised the big size of the cabinet of the world's poorest country.

There is no other country like Bangladesh (that we know of); where so much is expended for running a democratic government. Our ministers and politicians are not only dependent on the bureaucrats, they, for obvious reasons, are obliged to please them at every stage of their function/duty.

Had the present government heeded the dictum on reducing the size of the cabinet and the ministries thereof, a huge expenditure could be avoided; consequently the excess amount could be utilised for the suffering masses.

The prime minister had excluded a few ministers (mostly surplus) before. Recently, she has fired two 'for failures', but there are still many-- some redundant and some ineffectual.

May we hope that the PM will disburden herself and the country from the 'white elephants' and as a far-sighted leader she will bear in mind, "Better late than never".