Almost every week another building goes up in flames and dozens die in Dhaka. For those wondering why nothing is done to fix the zoning, structural, and fire code violations, ask yourself this: what is the incentive for an unelected government to do that ESPECIALLY when the violators—almost always big businesses with ownership interest held by those close to the ruling junta—are literally bankrolling the machinery of the dictatorship in the absence of any popular legitimacy. The issue is not laws or regulations…they exist in abundance. The problem just happens to be that there is no incentive for an unelected dictatorship to enforce those regulations when such enforcement potentially undermines one of the elements in its own very narrow base of legitimacy. Bangladesh’s press and television stations—ostensibly private but under the strong thumb of the government’s intelligence agencies and often led by rent-seeking cowardly producers and editors—will never mention this angle…because they themselves are part of that thin sliver of manufactured legitimacy.
Fire hazards in a dictatorship
Published by DocEsam
A Bengali by ethnicity, a college administrator and teacher by profession, and a bibliophile by passion whose heart breaks watching the debasement of Bangladesh's once vibrant pluralist democracy into a one party, one family dictatorship since 2014. View more posts
The only instance I am aware of where there has been (limited) success in reining in the loathsome rapaciousness of the Bangladeshi business elite is the post-Rana boycotts in the West of involved brands, which lead quickly to the creation of an oversight committee combining brand reps and diplomats, which exerted pressure to improve the safety, if not the pay, of RMG workers. It bypasses the government, and the national business class completely, putting direct economic conditions on factory owners and operators. As a result, new factories are being built outside Dhaka that meet basic code standards and provide things like real fire exits, and at least one village with which I am closely familiar is booming as a result.
Unfortunately, there is no similar path that would have any effect on builders and owners of these death traps. They are not dependent on foreign contracts, and indirect methods simply do not work. Cutting aid only hurts those dependent on aid, as the government has other sources of income aplenty in the structure of bribes and favours. The world’s most powerful nations would scream bloody murder if one tried to use international law to ‘interfere’ in the sovereign right of a nation to destroy its citizens in the name of profit. So it is left up to a government in whose interests it is decidedly *not* to enforce the laws that would limit the rapaciousness of developers and landlords.
Even India is not so shameless…