Editorial
The passing of Saifur Rahman
His influence on the economy has been far-reaching
THE death of M. Saifur Rahman in a road crash brings to an end a life that was spent largely in public service from the late 1970s onward. In the years after he joined the government of General Ziaur Rahman as commerce and then finance minister, Rahman played a pivotal role in the way Bangladesh's economy was to shape itself. He remains --- and this is to his credit --- the man who has presented the highest number of national budgets, to the country. That is testimony, in a broad sense, of his indispensability to the party and government he was part of almost to the end of his days. Saifur Rahman found himself on the national political canvas under Zia and then went on to expand his role in the two governments headed by Khaleda Zia. The economy, in a sense, came to be what he conceived it to be.
Saifur Rahman's influence in government stemmed from the bold role he played in opening up the economy, thus freeing it of the fetters it had begun to stagnate in through state control. And he did the job at the right time, in the early 1990s, when state domination of economies around the globe was coming to a speedy end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes in eastern Europe. Of course, Bangladesh was not part of that controlled political process. But Saifur Rahman knew that unless the country moved out of the nationalization structure that had been in place since the early 1970s and on to a free market highway, it would be unable to keep pace with the rest of the world. He moved vigorously, an act that he would continue during his last stint as finance minister in the last BNP-led government. The concept of a value added tax came from him. It is a measure of how credible and acceptable his policies have turned out to be that governments succeeding those he was part of have carried those policies forward.
For all his decisive steps in taking economic policy to a new, more dynamic direction, Saifur Rahman remained hamstrung in quite a few areas. One can mention here the constraints he faced in dealing with black money and the eventual concession he had to make through allowing such money to be whitened. It is a syndrome the country is yet to come out of. Saifur Rahman's final years, lived in the shadow of the caretaker government, were not particularly happy. The charges of corruption brought against his sons and his own brief association with the reformists in the BNP were to leave their mark on him.
All the same, Saifur Rahman was a man who did not mince words. He was outspoken in his criticism of ministries that did not perform. He was clear about his goals as a minister and went about achieving them. We mourn his passing.
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