It is a consolatory sigh of relief that the Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) has decided to investigate the case of the telecom minister who allegedly ordered the government owned telecom provider to cut off the connection of a company owned by a political opponent. That such an order came in direct and clear defiance of the High Court’s verdict is of little consolation to the victimised company. Where exactly was the telecom regulatory body BTRC in all this?
The same place that every other statutory body, commission authority, and panel is in Bangladesh: Nowhere to be seen except in seminars in Dhaka hotels and on donour-paid junkets abroad. The whole concept of independent agencies like NRB, Rajuk, BTRC, Office of the Information Commissioner, BTA, and so on, came about to bring professionalism into sector regulation and take petty politics out.
To that end, millions upon millions of donour dollars have been invested in writing the relevant laws, training the staff, and deploying infrastructure and technology. That of course, is the written law, which, in our political culture, is somewhat divorced from reality and has been so for a while.
The story is told of a newly-minted professor at Dhaka University’s law faculty in the mid-1960s who had given an exam to her first year contract and property law students with this standard question amongst the many being asked: What three ways does one acquire property? One of the examinees was honest to the proverbial fault and wrote down, as an answer: “Theft, bribery, and other means.”
The student received partial credit for the tongue-in-cheek response! The professor was none other than her country’s first woman barrister Salma Sobhan, a pioneering legal legend who was not known for her frivolity in matters of the law. Nonetheless, Barrister Sobhan was a realist not without a sense of humour, and had seen the unvarnished reality of politics at closer quarters than most of her contemporaries.
Most of Salma Sobhan’s later years, almost to her last day on this planet, were dedicated to public interest litigation, pushing for the sublime majesty of the law to become the reality of the land in Bangladesh.
That gap between the letter of the law and the reality on the ground continues to be gaping when it comes to the operation of statutory commissions. Far from the professional detachment and independent judgment expected of these panels of supposed experts, what the public experiences and the nation reads through its newspapers is quite the opposite: Ministerial and prime ministerial edicts simply conveyed to these commissions to be implemented without further scrutiny.
In any governance structure with a modicum of decency, the very hint that a cabinet member – let alone a ruling party executive – would try to influence such a regulatory panel would result in resignations and apologies. Conversely, the fact that so many commission chairmen and regulatory body executives can simply shirk their responsibilities by saying “the minister said so/did not say so” also results in atrophied governance where the buck is easy to pass.
Ask yourself this: If the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) chairman has to “recommend” that the home minister investigate a gruesome human rights tragedy, why exactly is there such an august commission to begin with? Or, for that matter, if the civil aviation minister can snap a finger and successfully ask the Civil Aviation Authority (CAAB) to cancel the airworthiness certificate of an airlines owned by a political opponent, why do we even have a CAAB?
The law is there; there is little confusion about it: Whether it is the Bangladesh Bank, the CAAB, the NHRC, the BTA, or Rajuk, they all exist so that professional experts can provide detached, impartial, and evidence-based oversight to large sectors of the economic landscape, without interference from incumbent political office holders of the day.
It is part and parcel of the principle of separation of powers: Politicians in a legislature craft the broad policies, and experts apply those policies impartially and with professional detachment. Mixing the two not only abrogates that principle of separation, but opens the door wide for corruption.
The result is a backward slide on the already bumpy road to modern good governance. The ultimate victim is the average citizen whose right to clean and efficient government is violated with impunity on a daily basis.
Had the BTRC acted as the regulator according to its own foundational law, the corruption allegations about the minister may never had a chance to materialise. The same can be said for a dozen or more similar statutory bodies who shirk their professional duties out of sycophancy which does few people any good in the long term, including the objects of that sycophancy itself. Why not take a slightly different approach for a change and, well, follow the law in its letter and spirit?
