“If you imagine, Some day it will happen. If you don’t imagine, It will never happen.”
Life has come full circle for Nobel laureate Professor Mohammad Yunus, who faced persecution during Sheikh Hasina’s regime for embezzlement. He is now all set to head the interim government in Bangladesh after she resigned and fled the country. President Mohammed Shahabuddin dissolved Parliament on Tuesday and appointed the 84-year-old economist as the head of an interim government. His decision was prompted by a demand by the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement to make him the non-partisan head of the caretaker government.
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| Upon Arrival of the country from France, Nobel Laureate Prof Dr Mohammad Yunus today called upon all to save the country from chaos and violence. [Photo: Palash Khan] |
Yunus, globally recognised as ‘The Father of Microfinance’, is expected to return to Bangladesh from Paris on Thursday to take charge. Yunus, who started as a Professor at national and international universities, earned the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for women’s empowerment through poverty alleviation and received multiple national and international awards over the years. However, back home, he faced harsh scrutiny by the Hasina government for more than a decade due to obscure reasons while authorities initiated a series of investigations against him after she came to power in 2008.
Bangladesh authorities launched a review of the statutory Grameen Bank’s activities in 2011 and fired Yunus as its founding managing director on charges of violating the government retirement regulation. Many people believe Hasina became enraged when Yunus announced that he would form a political party in 2007 when the country was run by a military-backed government and Hasina was in prison. Yunus, however, did not follow through on the plan but at that time he criticised Bangladeshi politicians alleging they were only interested in money. Meanwhile, over the years, he was charged under dozens of cases.
In January, Yunus was sentenced to six months in jail by a court on charges of labour law violation. On June 10 this year, a Dhaka court prosecuted Yunus and 13 others—currently out on bail—for embezzling as it rejected a plea for the dismissal of charges by the accused. The prosecution accused Yunus and the others of embezzling Taka 250 million (about USD 2 million) from the workers’ welfare fund of Grameen Telecom, which owns a 34.2 per cent stake in Bangladesh’s largest mobile phone operator, Grameenphone, a subsidiary of Norway’s telecom giant Telenor.
“She destroyed the legacy of her father Bangabandhu Mujibur Rahman. Bangladesh is liberated… We are a free country now,” Yunus told an Indian portal from Paris after news broke out of Hasina fleeing the country amid civil unrest. Yunus was in Paris for a minor medical procedure, as reported by local media, when the President agreed to make him the head of the interim government.
Notwithstanding the Hasina government’s stand, Yunus continued to receive international accolades, as was evident by the speech by Susanna B Afan, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, on June 27 this year at Manila. In 1984, the then 44-year-old Yunus was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership for “his pioneering efforts in enabling rural men and women to become economically self-sufficient through sound group-managed credit.” Stating that the work by Yunus, globally recognised as ‘The Father of Microfinance,’ has not just inspired similar projects in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Pakistan but their respective founders too received the Ramon Magsaysay Award.
The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for his work in poverty alleviation and the empowerment of poor women through Grameen Bank, where Yunus has “successfully melded capitalism with social responsibility” through the microcredit institution. Born in pre-Independence India in 1940 in Chittagong, Yunus first studied at Dhaka University in Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan. He went as a Fulbright scholar to study economics at Vanderbilt University in the US and obtained a PhD in economics in 1969. The very next year, he became an assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in the US but returned to Bangladesh to head the economics department at Chittagong University.
The bio published at the time when Yunus was awarded the Nobel lists his international achievements including from 1993 to 1995 as a member of the International Advisory Group for the Fourth World Conference on Women, a post to which he was appointed by the UN secretary-general. He has also served on the Global Commission of Women’s Health, the Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Development, and the UN Expert Group on Women and Finance, it adds.
Apart from multiple national awards, Professor Yunus is the recipient of numerous international awards for his ideas and endeavours from countries including Sri Lanka, the USA, Jordan, Sweden, Japan, The Netherlands, and South Korea. Published on January 1, 1991, his autobiography, ‘Banker to the Poor: Microlending and the Battle Against World Poverty,’ has been translated into at least a dozen languages including French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Gujarati, Chinese, and Arabic.
His sphere of influence was evident when in January, more than 241 global leaders, including over 125 Nobel Laureates and former US President Barack Obama, had expressed their concerns via an open letter to Hasina over Yunus’ “continuous judicial harassment and potential jailing.” With the regime change, it remains to be seen what will be the fate of over 150 other cases, including the major corruption charges that Yunus faces. Earlier, those could have seen him jailed for years if found guilty while the economist has denied all the wrongdoing.
When one clicks on Yunus’ own website, the very first quote of the Nobel laureate that greets you is, “If you imagine, Some day it will happen. If you don’t imagine, It will never happen.” For a person who had dreamed of a poverty-free Bangladesh, Yunus perhaps never had imagined that one day he would be heading his country.
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