Bangladesh Nobel winner Yunus to lead interim govt

The appointment came quickly after student leaders called on the 84-year-old Yunus — credited with lifting millions out of poverty in the South Asian country — to lead.

The decision was made in a meeting with President Mohammed Shahabuddin, the heads of the army, navy and air force, and student leaders.

“(They) decided to form an interim government with Professor Dr Muhammad Yunus as its chief,” Shahabuddin’s office said in a statement.

“The president has asked the people to help ride out the crisis. Quick formation of an interim government is necessary to overcome the crisis.”

Yunus will have the title of chief advisor, according to Haid Islam, one of the leaders of Students Against Discrimination who participated in the meeting.

Shahabuddin agreed that the interim government “will be formed within the shortest time” possible, Islam told reporters.

Islam described the meeting as “fruitful”.

However, there were few other details about the planned government, including the role of the military.

Yunus, who is currently in Europe, told AFP on Tuesday he was willing to lead the interim government.

“If action is needed in Bangladesh, for my country and for the courage of my people, then I will take it,” he said in a statement, also calling for free elections.

Muhammad Yunus: Bangladesh’s ‘banker to the poor’

Nobel-winning microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus has been asked by Bangladeshi protest leaders to helm an interim government to replace ousted premier Sheikh Hasina, who had hounded him in speeches and through the courts.

The 84-year-old, known as the “banker to the poorest of the poor”, was awarded the Peace Prize in 2006 for his work loaning small cash sums to rural women, allowing them to invest in farm tools or business equipment and boost their earnings.

Grameen Bank, the microfinance lender he founded, was lauded for helping unleash breakneck economic growth in Bangladesh. Since then, scores of developing countries have copied its work.

“Human beings are not born to suffer the misery of hunger and poverty,” Yunus said during his Nobel lecture, daring his audience to imagine a world where deprivation was confined to history museums.

But his public profile in Bangladesh earned him the hostility of Hasina, who 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 was hit with more than 100 criminal cases and a smear campaign by a state-led Islamic agency that accused him of promoting homosexuality.

The government unceremoniously forced him out of Grameen Bank in 2011 — a decision fought by Yunus but upheld by Bangladesh´s top court.

In January he and three colleagues from one of the companies he founded were sentenced to jail terms of six months — but immediately bailed pending appeal — by a Dhaka labour court which found they had illegally failed to create a workers´ welfare fund.

All four had denied the charges and, with courts accused of rubber-stamping decisions by Hasina´s government, the case was criticised as politically motivated by watchdogs including Amnesty International.

Yunus was born into a well-to-do family — his father was a successful goldsmith — in the coastal city of Chittagong in 1940.

He credits his mother, who offered help to anyone in need who knocked on their door, as his biggest influence.

Yunus won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States and returned soon after Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in 1971 war. When he returned, he was chosen to head Chittagong University´s economics department, but the young country was struggling through a severe famine and he felt compelled to take practical action.

“Poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it,” he said in 2006.

“I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom… I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me.”

After years of experimenting with ways to provide credit for people too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, he founded Grameen Bank in 1983.

The institution now has more than nine million clients on its books, according to its most recent annual report (2020), and more than 97 percent of its borrowers are women.

Yunus has won numerous high honours for his life´s work, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, which Barack Obama awarded him.