Nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus (centre) was flying back to Bangladesh on Aug 8 to lead a caretaker government after a student-led uprising ended the 15-year rule of Sheikh Hasina. – AFP
DHAKA: Nobel-winning microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus will helm Bangladesh's interim government after the ouster of 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 Nobel 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 and its work has since been copied by scores of developing countries.
"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.
Hasina's 15-year tenure was characterised by a growing intolerance of dissent before her hurried resignation and departure from Bangladesh on Monday (Aug 5) and Yunus's popularity had marked him as a potential rival.
Yunus announced plans in 2007 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.
He and three colleagues from one of the companies he founded were sentenced in January to jail terms of six months by a Dhaka labour court that found they had illegally failed to create a workers' welfare fund. However, they were immediately released on bail pending appeal.
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.
A Dhaka court acquitted him on appeal on Wednesday (Aug 7).
Student leaders, whose protest campaign culminated in Hasina's ouster, met the military and President Mohammed Shahabuddin late on Tuesday and the decision was made to "form an interim government with... Yunus as its chief", Shahabuddin's office announced.
"Be calm and get ready to build the country," Yunus said before beginning his journey back to Bangladesh on Thursday (Aug 8), calling for "free elections" within months.
"If we take the path of violence everything will be destroyed," he said.
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 a brutal 1971 war.
He was chosen to head Chittagong University's economics department when he returned 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."
He founded Grameen Bank in 1983 after years of experimenting with ways to provide credit for people too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.
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 per cent of its borrowers are women.
Yunus has won numerous high honours for his life's work, including a US Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by Barack Obama.
He is expected to be sworn in to office as chief adviser, leading the interim government, on Thursday. – AFP
