Yesterday, my wife declared that she wants a reform in our household affairs. I am not allowing space for decisions for the rest in the family. I pledged to oblige and I thanked her for defining reform perfectly. After all, reform has become the new potato in our civil society discussions and engagements. Everyone wants reform, everything needs to be reformed, every action is a reform but no one agrees on reform.
The 15+ years of the Hasina regime made fundamental changes to the way our country functions. The parliament, police, military, bureaucracy, constitution, education, business, health, banking, economy, media -- name an institution or a construct or a sector and the regime changed it or altered the functions of it to serve its agenda. It is therefore completely rational that there is a strong call for reform from all sections, especially the civil society. I am myself a party to this.
But lately, I am observing an alarming habit of putting reform in every topic and defining every action as reform. I am also observing an alarming trend of monetizing the reform agenda. I am deeply mindful about the boundaries between activism and business. Often when activism becomes business, we invent and reinvent the cause to keep it relevant. We are approaching that with the agenda of reform.
We all want essential reforms and we all agree that reform is a continuous process. Some policies require reform because they are no longer relevant or obsolete. Some policies require reform because they create the conditions for abuse and oppression. Reform is an essential process of our very existence. When we pick something so existential as a key agenda and rest all our focus on it, we forget that reform is not the end result, it is barely a routine maintenance job that we need to do. As such, the focus should be on putting the systems in place to identify the reform needs, to define the reform measures and to implement the reform measures. It has to be in auto pilot mode.
However, instead of focusing on building the systems for reform to be in autopilot, we are focusing on hard reform actions. It has thus become a lucrative topic and a monetizable business. Just two days back, when VP Nur was attacked brutally, many of our friends raised the issue that there was not enough initiative for police reform. Few days back, at a dinner, a friend said, if the bureaucracy is not reformed, we have no hope. A couple of weeks back, two important civil society representative friends kept arguing on the issue of “Bangla Tesla” -- whether to allow them or not.
This is where I want to park my discussion for a bit. Whether the auto rickshaws will be allowed or not is not a reform agenda, it is a policy action. We surely need to settle the debate through appropriate policies. But there is indeed a reform agenda here. The transportation system has to be overhauled. It has been weaponized by the political parties for decades to their advantage. So, while it remains a key employment sector for poorly-educated or uneducated youth, it has also been the weapon that can be unleashed to either crack down on the opposition or to sabotage the government. The reform agenda here is on modernizing the sector, bringing efficiency, transparency and growth.
Recently, the BNP acting chairperson, Tarique Rahman, has announced that BNP will plant 25-30 crore trees if the party is elected to power. That’s fantastic. It can very well be defined as a policy or an initiative. But I have heard someone using it as an example in a reform dialogue!
Forests are disappearing in Bangladesh. Nature-based resources are being exhausted. Just a few days back again, we had white stones in Bholaganj, Sylhet stripped bare only to be returned overnight by some magic. The natural resources have long been the means to feed the local political workers. Imagine planting 25-20 crore trees only to have them illegally cut off in their maturity to feed local party workers. How about the corruption that will come with the procurement of these 25-30 crore trees? How about the corruption that will come with the maintenance?
We need reform to ensure that the interventions work. And this is where my point is; reform is so existential that it does not need to be separated out for so long. We can of course talk about it and work on it for now but it should be to install the systems that would continue to do the reforms as they are needed. So, while I thank Tarique Rahman for declaring the tree plantation initiative, I want to know what systems will be put in place to ensure that we do not have further deforestation.
When an argument begins, it begins because there was a point of contention. But at one point, the fighting parties forget about the point of contention and they just keep on arguing. It then becomes the fight of egos.
The reform agenda is very relevant and is the one that we need to make progress on. But we must remember that we cannot pick thousands and thousands of reform agenda and address them all. We need to get to the system, we need to get to the core and install the system that would ensure that whenever the need arises, reforms are made and implemented.
Reform cannot be the favourite potato that we put in every meal. Our policies do not need to be the kacchhi biriyani and the reform does not need to be the potato without which the kachhi is worthless. Let us focus on the kitchen and ensure that it has all the apparatus needed to serve the dish that the nation needs for its nutrition.
Md Rubaiyath Sarwar is Managing Director, Innovision Consulting.