THE Nobel Prize winning Grameen Bank’s crises now through four years of its stalemate triggered by the Awami League government sees no end in sight. Rather fresh problems are overshadowing old ones. According to a national daily the bank is functioning without a Board of Directors in the last 10 months. No regular Managing Director is at work for the past four years and the absence of the Board has made the recruitment of the Managing Director all the more difficult. The government plan to elect the Board is again facing setback as it is failing to find a retired district judge to become chairman of the Election Commission to hold the election to the Board.
It shows a total deadlock at all levels mainly arising out of the government’s hostile relation with Nobel laureate Dr Muhammad Yunus who has founded the Grameen Bank and enlightened it as the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The government’s intention about the bank’s future is not clear. It wanted to relieve Prof. Yunus from the bank management and its activities. Meanwhile, the government has enacted new law to appoint a Managing Director and constitute the Board of Directors. The aim is to break apart the existing institutional set and remove the women directors from the Board who represent poor women as the owner of the bank. The new law has rearranged the election system of the Board which would effectively put the bank under government control. But nothing is working as per the government plan. But the bank is suffering from the vacuum of a strong leadership which it enjoyed under the dynamic managerial system that Prof Yunus had developed.
Once known as the bank of the poor and a global asset with its iconic institutional set up replicated by many countries all over the world for use of microcredit as an effective instrument to eliminate poverty, it is now in limbo without leadership. Neither the government is succeeding to overtake it nor allowing it to properly survive. People believe that it is time the crisis must end and the government must put the bank back into his hand. The man who has founded it can only save it from the brink.
Needless to say, Grameen Bank is a global name in poverty alleviation and it has earned the highest recognition for Bangladesh as a country of enterprising people like Prof Yunus who is now working to familiarize social business at the global level. Social business is becoming a new toll to overcome unemployment of younger generation people by developing non-profit business enterprises. Prof Yunus is admired as a global intellectual leader all over but his perils know no bound in his home country. People believe sanity must work to allow good work to continue.
