How Nepotism and Broken Systems Hold a Nation Hostage

Bangladesh stands at a critical historical juncture, yet its progress is suffocated by the heavy weight of corrupt state machinery. Across every vital organ of governance, rampant corruption, deep-seated institutional decay, procrastination of decision-making (red-tapism) and an unaccountable bureaucracy have formed a destructive axis. The civil service, once envisioned as the steel frame of public administration, has devolved into a self-serving apparatus. Nowhere is this systemic rot more visible than in the civil service recruitment pipeline. Bangladesh Public Service Commission (BPSC) has lost its credibility, plagued by persistent question leaks in various public service examinations and an archaic evaluation system. The unconscionable procrastination in publishing final Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) results traps tens of thousands of the educated youths in endless precarity. This is no longer mere administrative inefficiency; it is a state-sponsored trap designed to filter out merit and elevate compliance. When the gatekeepers of meritocracy are compromised, the state inevitably falls into the hands of the worst – the least qualified and the most corrupt.

This entrenched kakistocracy – or perhaps more accurately, an “idiocracy” – was deliberately engineered by the previous regime, which systematically sidelined democratic norms to appoint fiercely loyal, highly inefficient and shamelessly corrupt individuals across every sector. The current administration now appears to be weak, held hostage by this inherited, unaccountable bureaucratic network. When the state capacity is hollowed out by clientelism, public policy ceases to serve the public good. Instead, it becomes a mechanism for elite resource extraction. Without curbing this pervasive corruption and halting the bleeding of public money, the government will remain fundamentally incapable of managing its financial affairs or restoring public trust.

The economic consequences of this institutional capture are devastating. Good governance remains an elusive, far-fetched challenge for the banking sector, which has been completely gutted by decades of deliberate mismanagement, insider scamming and a complete breakdown of regulatory oversight. According to recent data from Bangladesh Bank, non-performing loans (NPLs) have ballooned to a staggering Tk6,06,555 crore, meaning that nearly Tk33 out of every Tk100 in bank loans is now classified as bad debt, giving Bangladesh one of the worst NPLs rates globally. The central bank has catastrophically failed to restore public faith or trust in financial institutions. Compounding this, the public is left in the dark, deeply sceptical of whether the government is sincerely working on bringing back the massive volumes of public money siphoned off during the previous regime. Instead of stabilising a volatile economy, public money continues to be squandered on unnecessary, inflated mega-projects initiated by the past government – monuments to kickbacks that offer little to no social return on investment.

Meanwhile, the annual inflation rate sits heavily at a punishing 8.34 per cent, drastically affecting low-income and fixed-income earners who watch their purchasing power evaporate daily. Yet, despite a soaring external debt that stands at $78.22 billion and an increasingly crushing loan repayment burden, the government made the baffling decision to implement the 9th pay scale for the government employees. To fund this, the government has made a decision to take a staggering Tk5,000 crore loan directly from commercial banks. Now the question remains, why must ordinary citizens and struggling taxpayers bear an extra tax burden to a pay rise for an underperforming public sector, while millions of private sector workers are left to navigate severe mental stress, frustration and economic precarity entirely alone?

More dangerously, this economic mismanagement occurs against a backdrop of a severe educated youth unemployment crisis, where graduate unemployment hovers near 13.5 per cent –nearly three times the national average. This swelling pool of jobless, frustrated young graduates creates a volatile environment ripe for the kind of severe social unrest we are currently witnessing in other parts of the world. Is the government aware of it?

A similarly broken reality plagues the public health sector, where the Ministry of Health has proven utterly incapable of holding government physicians accountable. Public hospitals and medical colleges are structurally broken, characterised by missing staff or technicians, absent doctors, and defunct medical equipment. This failure constitutes a direct misappropriation of public funds, but citizens pay taxes for healthcare they are forced to seek elsewhere. Consequently, patients are driven into an expensive private healthcare sector. Here, a parallel crisis thrives: many doctors practicing privately evade taxes systematically, keeping themselves off the tax net while exploiting the public’s desperation.

The education sector similarly demands radical, structural reform rather than superficial fixes. True educational modernisation cannot be reduced to gimmicky, high-cost projects like “one teacher, one tab” or the arbitrary introduction of a third language into an already faltering school curriculum. Classrooms do not need to be digitised for young children. Rather, the government must ensure non-digital, highly interactive classrooms that foster human connection and deep focus on learning. The national curriculum must be completely rewritten to prioritise emotional intelligence, civic education, critical thinking and ethical responsibility alongside robust technical and vocational skills. We must stop treating education as a procurement racket and start treating it as the foundation of national character.

Public policy theory teaches us that structural flaws dictate human behaviour. As the pioneering management theorist W. Edwards Deming famously observed, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Bangladesh cannot expect honest individuals to fix an apparatus designed to corrupt them. To escape this kakistocracy trap, the entire state machinery must be rebuilt from the ground up to ensure that it is run exclusively by an enlightened, efficient, courageous and honest leadership. True governance reform is not about tweaking administrative rules. It is, of course, about permanently dismantling the systems that reward incompetence and restoring a merit-driven social contract for the citizens of Bangladesh.
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The writer is an Associate Professor of English at Stamford University Bangladesh.

He could be contacted at [email protected]