It is not surprising to know that around 70.9% of Bangladesh households have had to pay bribes to get government services in various sectors in 2021 as revealed in a household survey of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB). It is also not surprising to know from the survey that the law enforcement agencies are the most corrupt service sector (74.4%). The next is the Department of Immigration and Passports (DIP) (70.5%) followed by Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) (68.3%).
What is surprising for us is that though we know that service seekers in government offices have to give bribes to whatever tables their files move, or looting of money occurs in whatever projects the government takes up for decades, no visible and credible effort has been found from the government, or even society in larger sense, to root out the corruption. We have an Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) to check sleaze in government offices but this ACC is a heavily politicised entity and it ostensibly moves in selective cases to put down the political opponents. It is now considered a toothless tiger!
To encourage corruption among the government officials, three years ago a strange law was passed in Bangladesh that stipulated that law enforcement agencies-and they are the most corrupt however-cannot arrest or detain public servants without prior permission from the relevant government authorities. A few days ago after a High Court Bench had scrapped this law, just yesterday the Appellate Division stayed the HC order responding to the petition of the state against HC order. We do not know what will be the ultimate fate of this law, the fact is with people’s moral nature going down below the pit, we do not have much hope that within a short time corruption is going to be minimised in Bangladesh’s services sector.
For many here, corruption has now become a socially acceptable fact. Why should it not be? We had a bureaucrat-turned politician, a former finance minister, once notoriously called bribing for services in the government office ‘speed money’. If this was the case, how could society get redemption from corruption?
People usually turn to the judiciary if they do not get rule of law from the administration or otherwise, but even this judiciary is also now greatly corrupted and according to the TIB’s recent study, it is the fourth in the list in the services sector with a score of 56.8%. Therefore, it would not be an overstatement to say that the future of the country is really bleak with politics of the country continuously going the wrong way.
