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

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus (C) shakes hands with senior members of the Bangladesh Army, upon his arrival at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka on August 8, 2024. (AFP)

• Yunus was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for work on loaning small cash sums to rural women
• Was hit with a 100 criminal cases and smear campaign by state-led agency after being at odds with government

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 characterized by a growing intolerance of dissent before her hurried resignation and departure from Bangladesh on Monday 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 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 labor 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 criticized as politically motivated by watchdogs including Amnesty International.
A Dhaka court acquitted him on appeal on Wednesday.