Opinion: How Bangladesh’s new leader is a friend to Utah

I once asked Muhammad Yunus — the Nobel laureate who invented microcredit as a way to help the poor and who was, at the time, under relentless persecution by the prime minister in his home country of Bangladesh — why he didn’t just leave.

Why keep pushing his ideas of lifting the poor through enterprise, “social businesses,” affordable nutrition that could cure night blindness and cheap cellphones that are within financial reach of the very poor, among many other things? Why continue in a country where the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was threatening him with jail while making public statements about dunking him in the Padma River to teach him a lesson? Why stay when she had forced him off the board of directors of his own bank?

His answer started simply but grew more emotional as he spoke.

“What I have done in Bangladesh is my life’s work,” he said. “It’s made a difference to the people of Bangladesh. I cannot just walk away from the things I have done. It’s not that it’s all done and finished. It’s ongoing all the time.

“Some woman (Prime Minister Hasina) says crazy things and I ran away because she scared me off? That’s not the kind of thing we should be doing. …

“All the work I have done is here in Bangladesh. And all the people who worked with me, hundreds and hundreds of them, have dedicated their entire lives. They’re not attracted to going abroad. They’re not attracted to doing a government job. They’re not attracted to other businesses. They’ve devoted themselves to something they believed in, and stayed with us.

“If I walked away, what happens to them? They’re abandoned! And what happens to all the work?”

This week, that loyalty, that devotion to his native land, finally paid off.

Yunus, a friend to Utah who has visited several times, speaking to business leaders and others along the Wasatch Front, and who even had cataract surgery at Alta View Hospital, was made interim leader of a transitional government in Bangladesh on Tuesday at the age of 84.

This came after days of violent protests from student leaders that finally forced the prime minister to resign and flee. Protesters stormed her home and the nation’s Parliament building, then burned many government offices. The Washington Post placed the death toll among protesters and security forces at about 400.

Once Hasina had left, the organizers of the revolt met with military leaders and the nation’s president, Mohammed Shahabuddin, and decided to appoint Yunus in charge of remaking the country.

People close to Yunus told me Tuesday they were having trouble comprehending how quickly things had changed. Earlier in the week, they told me they feared for whatever type of leader may rule the country next. By Tuesday, when it was clear Yunus would be that person, one friend called it “mind-bending.”

But as the line from the Broadway musical “Hamilton” puts it, “Winning was easy … Governing’s harder.” The Bangladesh Parliament is dissolved. Sources talk about the need to replace corrupt leadership in government agencies and the need to encourage new political parties. Yunus, who was in Paris acting as a consultant for how the Olympics could use social business practices to help the poor after the Games, must assemble an interim government that, as yet, has no defined tenure. He needs to bring order to a nation riven by conflict and restore trust in institutions. That can be much harder than starting a bank or a business.

Yunus has resonated with the people of Utah because he helps the poor by teaching them how to help themselves — offering them permanent solutions, not handouts. He operates within the principles of capitalism, but with a twist — his belief that people are motivated by more than just money.

“Ask yourself, why do people climb Mount Everest?” he told an audience at the Alta Club in Salt Lake City a few years ago. “Many people do this, even some who are blind or crippled. They risk their lives to do it. Are there stacks of money up there they need to go and get?

“If I make money for myself, I am happy. If I make other people happy, I am super happy,” he said. “You can do both.”

Amazingly, many people in Bangladesh seem to have seen through the false accusations in recent years and have favorable feelings toward Yunus. That gives him a huge advantage as he prepares to climb a different sort of Everest.

As he wrote recently in The Economist , “No Bangladeshi younger than 30 has ever cast a vote in an unrigged national election. Over the past 15 years the government corrupted many of our institutions, most tragically the judiciary and education system, at all levels.”

Americans need Yunus to succeed. Giving Bangladesh a free and democratic government could lift millions out of poverty while pressuring other countries in the region to do the same. He never gave up on his homeland. Now, like much of what he has done in life, this dedication could ripple far and wide.