An unwise decision

The stated purpose sounds international but from the wrong end of the spectrum. It's being adopted as an austerity measure to cushion the effects of increased energy price. The decision would have been positively internationally oriented had the holidays been Saturday and Sunday instead of the Friday-Saturday combine, which, to be honest, is even worse than neither here-nor-there scenario.

Actually, the announcement of the two-day official weekend comes pat on the back of our government's very steep oil price hike. One may, therefore, read a good deal into the timing of the decision. We wonder whether it has been deliberately dramatised as a ploy to divert public attention away from the higher petroleum costs, including those of diesel and kerosene. If austerity is what the government is aiming at -- through the two-day weekend -- then where was the need for domestically raising the fuel price that high? After all the money saved from the intended cost cutting could have minimised Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation's losses. Couldn't the excise and other duties be reduced on the import price of oil to cushion off the effects of higher international fuel prices for the sake of domestic consumers?

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The world we deal with has Saturday and Sunday as weekly holidays. Malaysia, Indonesia and, nearer home Pakistan, all of them no less Islamic than Bangladesh, have Saturday-Sunday official weekend. Evidently because of the overriding, shall we say commonsensical, consideration that the world they have transactions with, are closed on Saturday and Sunday. Saudi Arabia is an exception, but then it is a one-item economy which is oil.

For purely populist reasons, out of imaginary fears for losing out on votes and just to project Islamicity, the government still sticks to Friday as holiday even when the occasion came to change it. But our religion nowhere commands that Friday should be a closed holiday; all it says is, after the Juma prayers return to your livelihood pursuits. The business world, the government, the intelligentsia and civil society at large will be losing three straight days with the outside world if we should keep to Friday and Saturday as holidays.

The government must revert to Saturday-Sunday weekly holidays that had been once in vogue .