The city corporation elections slated for April 28 will see nearly 12.5% of the country’s population exercise the franchise, offering not only a barometer reading on the state of the republic but also a glimpse into the current state of leadership in Bangladesh.
As the 18.5 million residents of the country’s three most populous city corporations go to the ballot box to elect their next chief metropolitan officer, citizens rightly ask: Who exactly are their would-be leaders?
The Dhaka Tribune has collated data on 59 of the 60 candidates for the three mayoral polls to answer this very question.
The wealth of information in the candidates’ nomination papers shows tremendous variety among the contenders for the Dhaka North, Dhaka South and Chittagong city mayoral race.
Representing an array of occupational and educational backgrounds, candidates appear to reflect the diversity of the constituencies they aspire to serve.
Work-wise, the vast majority of the mayor aspirants, 37 to be exact, described their profession as “business.”
One, Sarah Begum Kabari, is an actress, while several other aspirants described themselves as writers, even though they did not describe how writing contributed to their incomes.
Descriptions of professions ran the gamut of occupations from ASM Akram, who is a rentier, to Bazlur Rashid Firoz and Abdulah Al Kafi, who described themselves as full-time politicians.
Another candidate described his work as being a politician but also listed writing as a profession.
Four wordsmiths joined a clothier in the competition for mayor, describing their occupations respectively as writer or poet, and tailor.
Journalists, travel agents, lawyers, wholesalers, contractors and publishers rubbed shoulders with each other in the match for the mandate.
One proud business proprietor, Abdul Khalek, named his nutritive product as his occupation – tehari, a rice casserole popular in the three metropolises. Another, who presumably offers nourishment of a spiritual kind, described himself as the Imam of a mosque.
Just under half of the candidates, 28 to be exact, are at least graduates, meaning that they completed the tertiary level of education.
Two candidates, Asaduzzaman Ripon and Rezaul Karim Chowdhury, identify themselves as PhD holders, while another two were educated in the madrasa system and hold Master’s-equivalent Kamil degrees.
The remaining tertiary educated candidates include those who describe themselves simply as graduates as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degree holders in the arts, commerce and sciences. Two have LLMs, and one, Bobby Hajjaj, is an MBA.
Eight candidates describe their educational attainment as “self-educated” and two as “literate.”
Seventeen candidates say they received formal schooling up to the secondary level, ranging from the completion of class VIII to the completion of HSCs. This includes a number who completed their SSCs and one who completed the madrasa system’s Alim qualification.
Without making any scientific claims, it is probably fair to say that the breakdown of candidates’ educational and occupational backgrounds reflects the diversity of the citizenry who will choose their mayors from among them later this month.
