Overseas trips, towels and tables

PRIME Minister Sheikh Hasina is, like many of us, worried about the frequent trips civil servants periodically make abroad. On the face of it, we should not be overly worried about these trips. For if civil servants, or people in other areas of life for that matter, are invited to seminars and conferences abroad, who are we to grumble? Obviously, there must be some very real, some very good reasons why all these men at the centre of administrative authority are provided with the opportunity of going abroad to speak for the country.
And yet there are all those naughty questions which sometimes assail us, to a point where we begin to wonder if this poverty-struck nation can afford to have those bureaucrats make all those trips to foreign lands. And from that point of reflection we have another that seems to make sense: to what extent are we as a nation enlightened by these men returning from abroad with all their newly accumulated experience? Ah, but before that, there is the inevitable query: do these peripatetic bureaucrats at all come by enlightenment themselves as they go around the world?
It is agreed that the prime minister had a point. From what we have seen of the doings of the bureaucracy in this country, we do share her point of view on this pretty vexing matter of foreign travel. But then, barely a day after that exhortation served on our civil servants, she headed straight for Stockholm to speak for the country on climate change and assorted questions. Of course, it is a fine thing for a national leader to be projecting her country abroad, to be symbolising all the good that we have consistently held on to as part of our heritage.
But there are some lines that must be drawn, too, where a trip abroad by a head of government is concerned. You can happily be part of the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly, for that is one place where powerful men and women gather from diverse regions of the globe once September comes round. Stockholm a few weeks ago was unlike New York, though. You can simply count on your fingers the prominent people who were there. The halls were largely empty. It makes no one happy when your prime minister speaks and the camera zeroes in on all those empty chairs in the cavernous hall.
It is perhaps time for a change in culture. We refer obviously to what those in authority should be doing in order to give the country a sense of the seriousness they attach to their work. How about doing away with the frills that come with an exercise of power? But, first, let all those towels (and you see them on the backs of the high chairs ministers, bureaucrats, businessmen and so many others use as a mark of the power they wield) be thrown out the window. Decency does not call for towels to be on display in offices.
And now this small matter of the table around which the council of ministers meets regularly for its assessments of conditions in the country. It is a bad legacy, that table and those chairs and the geography that comes with them, we have inherited from dictatorial times. The huge distance separating the head of government, literally, from her cabinet colleagues is awe-inspiring, often to the point of being fear-inducing.
Must a cabinet based on the Westminster system of government look like a class of school children being lectured to by their headmistress? The answer should be obvious. So what is called for is for more proximity and therefore more rapport between the prime minister and her colleagues. Have that table replaced or packed off to the museum. And then have our powerful men and women take a leaf out of the books which Barack Obama and Gordon Brown happen to have on their shelves. In short, why should our government figures not sit around a table of the sort the American or British government sits around and is evidently comfortable with?
That said, there is this point about not making an entire cabinet and an entire diplomatic corps troop down to the airport every time the prime minister leaves the country and then returns to it. There is nothing modern about it. Indeed, there is a whiff of the medieval, of the feudal, about the entire protocol here. It must be speedily dispensed with, which act will be a potent sign of governance finally getting to be a serious affair in Bangladesh.
And governance infinitely gets to be better, a most charming thing, when ministers and other public figures choose not to be seen on the media day after day. As a rule, people are not terribly impressed with ministers constantly, sometimes insistently, finding themselves before a battery of microphones and throwing pearls of wisdom before the country. Wisdom is invaluable and pearls are a delight. But they must come through concrete action rather than empty rhetoric. Politicians in office and civil servants are or should be too busy to go around town inaugurating art exhibitions or speaking at a ubiquity of seminars. If they are on their feet all the time, it is the country which screeches to a halt. Will someone tell them that?
Ah, but let us call it a day.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
E-mail: [email protected]