Ministers should uphold rule of law

Obaidul Quader and Shajahan Khan are in charge of communications and shipping ministries respectively. But the latter believes that on highway accidents he has the last word. No sooner had the communications minister emphasised maximum alert on the part of drivers to shun reckless driving and overloading and be compliant with traffic rules than his colleague in the shipping ministry reacted disapprovingly. At once he swung to a stout defense of the drivers blaring his pet slogan: 'drivers are not killers, rather they are service providers'.
Communications minister must have regretted sitting under the same canopy of an official programme on awareness-building among drivers with the shipping minister on Monday. But the presence of the shipping minister was because he is the executive president of the Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation, a co-organiser of the programme with the BRTA and Dhaka Metropolitan Police. Evidently, there is a conflict of interest issue here: a cabinet minister wearing the hat of a trade union federation. Setting aside that issue for a moment, whereas the minister should have used his clout as a trade union leader to motivate the transport operators to embrace the road safety agenda, he is being indiscriminately indulgent to them.
He is obviously playing to his constituency, more than his remit as a minister involving collective responsibility as member of the cabinet. Governance is based on rule of law. There are rules for licensing fitness of transport and competence of the drivers apart from the whole raft of traffic rules the vehicle operators have to adhere to. He must have minimum educational qualification, aptitude, skill training, road sense and knowledge of traffic rules to be on the driver's seat. No government worth its salt can compromise on these requirements.
As an integral part of both the normative and operational code of governance, even trade unionism is governed by a set of rules, a reform of which is long overdue. In any case, it can't run on the clout of sheer numbers. If that happens, the very core of governance will stand threatened. Therefore, we would urge a complete submission of an individual or a group to the rule of law and values of governance.