A Nobel-winning microfinance pioneer, Muhammad Yunus has been credited with lifting millions out of poverty in his native Bangladesh. He arrived back in Dhaka on Thursday, tasked with steering the South Asian country out of chaos after mass protests and spiralling unrest forced longtime prime minister Sheikh Hasina to flee.
Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate known as the “banker to the poorest of the poor”, has been chosen to lead Bangladesh's interim government after Hasina resigned and fled abroad in the face of a broad uprising against her authoritarian rule. He will act as a caretaker premier until new elections are held.
News of Hasina’s abrupt demise came as Yunus was recovering from surgery in Paris, where he also served as an adviser for the Summer Olympics. A longtime critic of the ousted prime minister, he described her fall as Bangladesh’s “second Liberation Day” in an interview with FRANCE 24 on Monday.
“Sheikh Hasina was the key to the problem. She held fake elections one after another,” Yunus said. “This is a day of great celebration for us. We are free from all the oppression and all the attacks, all the mismanagement, all the corruption.”
Yunus, 84, was the preferred candidate of student leaders whose protest movement escalated into a broader uprising against Hasina after she ordered a violent crackdown that led to more than 400 deaths.
Read moreProtests in Bangladesh: the reasons for the rage
The Nobel laureate said on Wednesday that he had agreed to lead an interim government following talks between student leaders, the military and the country’s president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, who dissolved parliament a day earlier.
“Be calm and get ready to build the country,” he said in a statement, urging calm after weeks of violence. “Let us make the best use of our new victory,” he later told reporters at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris as he prepared to board a flight back to Bangladesh.
Fighting poverty
An economist and banker by profession, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering the use of microcredit to help impoverished people, particularly women. The Nobel Peace Prize committee lauded Yunus and Grameen Bank, the lender he founded, “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below”.
Yunus, who was born in 1940 in Chittagong, a seaport city in Bangladesh, has credited his mother with inspiring his efforts to alleviate poverty, noting how she offered help to anyone in need who knocked on their door.
“Human beings are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty,” he said during his Nobel lecture, daring his audience to imagine a world where deprivation was confined to history museums.
Yunus won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States and returned soon after Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in a brutal 1971 war. In a 2004 interview with AP, he said he had a “eureka movement” to establish Grameen Bank when he met a poor woman weaving bamboo stools who was struggling to pay her debts.
“I couldn’t understand how she could be so poor when she was making such beautiful things,” he recalled in the interview.
Founded in 1983, Grameen Bank provided small loans to entrepreneurs who would not normally qualify to receive them. The institution now has more than nine million clients on its books, according to its most recent annual report in 2020, and more than 97 percent of its borrowers are women.
The bank’s success in lifting people out of poverty has inspired similar microfinancing efforts in developing countries and in wealthier ones too. Its success has helped promote Yunus’s model of “social business”, which aims to strike a balance between social objectives and financial goals
'Running from one court to another’
Yunus has won numerous high honours for his life's work, including a US Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded in 2009 by then-president Barack Obama. But his public profile in Bangladesh earned him the hostility of Hasina, who regarded the Nobel laureate as a potential rival and once accused him of “sucking blood” from the poor.
In 2007, Yunus announced plans to set up his own "Citizen Power" party to end Bangladesh's confrontational political culture, which has been punctuated by instability and periods of military rule. He abandoned those ambitions within months, but the enmity aroused by his challenge to the ruling elite has persisted.
Yunus has been hit with more than 100 criminal cases as well as a smear campaign by a state-led Islamic agency that accused him of promoting homosexuality. Hasina’s regime notably accused Yunus of using force and other means to recover loans from poor rural women as the head of the bank – allegations he denied.
The government unceremoniously forced him out of Grameen Bank in 2011 in a move fought by Yunus but upheld by Bangladesh's top court. That year a Norwegian investigation dismissed allegations that he and his bank had misused Norwegian funds.
Read more‘Today feels like a second Liberation Day,’ Bangladesh Nobel laureate Yunus tells FRANCE 24
In January 2024, Yunus and three colleagues from one of the companies he founded were sentenced to jail terms of six months by a Dhaka labour court, which found they had illegally failed to create a workers' welfare fund. All four denied the charges and the case was criticised as politically motivated by watchdogs including Amnesty International.
“I was restricted by the Hasina regime. I was accused of many things, funny things that she came up with,” Yunus told FRANCE 24. “I'm running from one court to another court fighting those false cases. And that was one of the tactics used by the old regime.”
Restoring democracy
Steering the transition to a new regime will be a formidable challenge for the Nobel laureate with no experience of government, who inherits a country in turmoil and a democracy devitalised by Hasina’s widely discredited polls.
With the caretaker government yet to be formed, there are no details of how long it might be in power, when elections might be held and who will be eligible to run for office. And while the interim government is set to be led by civilians, it is unclear what degree of control the army may seek to exercise in a country with a long history of military rule and coups.
Army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman said Wednesday that he hoped to swear in the interim government the following day and that he backed Yunus.
“I am certain that he will be able to take us through a beautiful democratic process and that we will benefit from this,” Waker said in a televised address.
Yunus told the Financial Times he was initially reluctant to take on a leadership role, but ultimately agreed to the students’ demands. “Given the sacrifices of the students, especially those who have lost their lives for our nation’s liberation, I am not in a position to say no to them,” he told the UK daily.
In his earlier interview with FRANCE 24, Yunus praised Bangladesh’s “vibrant” youth and highlighted the need to harness its untapped potential.
“Bangladesh is an amazingly creative country. It’s full of young people and full of energy, full of creative power. If given a chance, they can do wonderful things,” he said, noting that the Southeast Asian country has already proven its potential on the world stage.
“Bangladesh has created microcredit, which is followed by the whole world,” he added. “It has also created the social business model, now followed everywhere in the world, including here at the Paris Olympics.”
(With AP, AFP)
