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, 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.
Before her hurried resignation and departure from Bangladesh on Monday, Hasina’s 15-year tenure was characterised by a growing intolerance of dissent, and Yunus’s popularity marked him as a potential rival.
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.
Student leaders whose protest campaign culminated in Hasina’s ouster on Monday were expected to meet with the military to demand Yunus lead a caretaker government.
Yunus has not commented on the call for him to lead but he said in an interview with India’s The Print that Bangladesh had been “an occupied country” under Hasina.
“Today all the people of Bangladesh feel liberated,” it quoted him as saying.
‘Poverty was all around me’
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.
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 a US Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by Barack Obama.
