Bangladesh:
Muhammad Yunus, the “Banker to the Poor”

Aug 19, 2024

This article is translated from the August 13 issue, #2924 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

Muhammad Yunus, set to become Bangladesh’s new Prime Minister, has been dubbed the “banker to the poor,” and he obviously owes his appointment to the illusions such a title can inspire.

The new Prime Minister, aged 84, was an industrialist, then an economics professor for years in the United States. After a terrible famine in Bangladesh in 1974, he is best known for advocating “micro-credit”: poor farmers and craftsmen grouping together to lend each other small sums of money.

Yunus founded the Grameen Bank, the “village bank.” The bank flourished, and in 2008 he wrote that “social business is the missing piece of capitalism.” This earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, and the Medal of Freedom from Obama in 2009. It didn’t put an end to poverty or to the crisis of capitalism, but it did earn him an image in his country as a man of integrity, concerned with ways to combat poverty. He opposed Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule, and for years had been accused of defamation, embezzlement, and infringement of labor law, under harassment by the authorities.

So, it was a man with the image of a friend of the poor who was chosen to give a new facade to Bangladeshi power, no doubt because it is likely to make a predominantly very poor population, perhaps on the verge of a social explosion, wait.

It remains to be seen how long he can maintain the illusion of change without attacking the privileges of the ruling classes, unequal social structures, and imperialism.