The Case for the DP World Deal

For many years, a mafia eco-system called the “Port Protection Syndicate” has been built to keep Chittagong Port hostage in the hands of a domestic mafia network.

At the top level of this syndicate are the misguided leftists, who construct a kind of moral argument of “protecting the country” against foreign investment in terminal operations.

The second level consists of the port operator mafia circle, who want a guaranteed income of thousands of crores of taka by controlling port operations.

The third level is the politician syndicate -- which until now was run by the Awami League, and to which BNP and Jamaat have now joined.

In the clearly ChatGPT-written English Facebook statuses of Tarique Rahman’s script-writers, the argument is made that an unelected government has no right to take long-term strategic decisions; Jamaat has taken a position against this agreement.

NCP will either maintain strategic silence or take the same position -- just wait and see.

During the Awami League regime, AJM Nasir made money by fronting Saif Powertec, a generator supply company. In the upcoming BNP regime, the BNP leaders of Chittagong will get it. Jamaat and NCP will directly receive their share from the port operators. This is the science.

At the very bottom of this eco-system is the labour mafia circle, who at any moment threaten strikes and keep port operations hostage, and whose leadership is mainly linked to leftist labour politics.

These four elements constitute the mafia syndicate eco-system for “protecting” Chittagong Port.

The job of the leftist part of this mafia syndicate is to write articles in newspapers, turning the logic of keeping the port in the hands of these mafias into a country-protection argument and manufacturing public consent for it.

Riding on the logic of the leftist syndicate, the job of the BNP and Jamaat political syndicate is to raise arguments about lack of transparency, conflict of interest, and the legitimacy of an unelected government.

The job of the business syndicate is to provide financial backing to this political syndicate.

And the job of the labour syndicate is to create pressure on the government by paralyzing the port through agitation.

All four of these groups have now united against the contract with DP World.They are raising objections on three points:

Lack of transparency

Conflict of interest

An unelected government has no authority to take long-term strategic decisions.

Since this contract was made during Sheikh Hasina’s time, continuity is being maintained; there is no new scope for conflict of interest here.The question of transparency is important.During Hasina’s time, we demanded that clauses of various contracts be made public, and we will make the same demand of the next government. So why should the interim government consider itself exempt from responsibility?

Of course, due to non-disclosure agreements, not all clauses of such contracts can be disclosed, but the broad outlines can and should be made public. I don’t know why the interim government has not engaged stakeholders more or disclosed those parts.

Signing the contract on the day of Hasina’s fall certainly creates suspicion of opacity -- this is a typical example of the incompetence, arrogance, lack of transparency, and political immaturity of the interim government’s winter-bird technocrats.

But although I broadly agree with the argument that an unelected government has no right to take strategic decisions, in the specific case of Chittagong Port I am willing to ignore that argument, because for elected political governments of Bangladesh, taking certain decisions while ignoring vested interests is extremely difficult -- only this unelected interim government can do it.

Therefore, Professor Yunus’s interim government has a moral duty to ensure transparency of this contract made during Sheikh Hasina’s tenure and hand over Chittagong Port to DP World before the next government arrives.

If that is not done, what will happen is that once an elected government comes, the same excuses will be used, the contract will remain suspended, and once again Chittagong Port’s operations will be held hostage by the mafia syndicate. As a result, the price of rice, wheat, and oil on your plate will rise.

My senior from Ispahani School, Captain Atique UA Khan, has very clearly shown: in China, after a ship anchors, five cargo holds can be cleared by five cranes in a single day.

The reality in Chittagong is: three days at the outer anchorage, indefinite waiting inside the port for a berth, one week to discharge using small lighter vessels, discharge stops if the sea is rough -- all added up, instead of 2 days, in some cases it is taking 25 days.

Because of these 25 days, ship charter costs, lighter vessel costs, sailors’ salaries -- everything gets added to the price of goods.

As a result, the price of your wheat, oil, sugar, fertilizer -- and through them rice and everything else -- goes up.

He gave another example: because of this delay, we cannot manage crises. If there is a sudden sugar shortage and prices rise, we need to import quickly. But because of the port’s slowness, lead time becomes 30 days instead of 15. In that extra time, the business syndicate keeps prices high and profits.

Another consequence is that knowing it will take longer to import during a crisis, businessmen take the risk of keeping buffer stock for extra profit. The cost of that risk -- “risk premium” -- gets added even to the price of goods that have no shortage.

Thus, because of Chittagong Port, the price of every item on your table rises. Now the leftists’ favourite argument is: “First fix customs at the port, because that’s where most time is wasted.”

The argument is not entirely wrong, but in the whole eco-system you have to start somewhere.

Breaking the fangs of Bangladesh’s bureaucratic mafia is not easy. The skill needed to break the pieces of these bureaucratic mafias is something elected politicians do not have -- and I won’t embarrass myself by talking about the capacity of an unelected NGO-gram government.

So if today, through an unelected government, we can fix one part of this entire eco-system, we must seize that opportunity.

My main argument in favour of giving DP World long-term terminal operation lease is knowledge transfer. When an institution like DP World comes, the global knowledge and best practices they bring will benefit not only Chittagong Port but also Dhaka Airport, Chittagong Airport, Mongla Port -- everyone.

Because they will create human resources through international-standard operational rules, protocols, tendering processes, and training, and those human resources will spread that knowledge to other sectors as well.

The same thing happened in Bangladesh’s banking sector in the 1990s. Ninety percent of the CEOs of scheduled banks in Bangladesh once worked at ANZ Grindlays Bank (which later became Standard Chartered). Why? Because SCB trained local managers and transferred operational knowledge.

Later, those local managers who worked at SCB used that knowledge to build capacity and efficiency in local banks.

But the rhetoric of the interim government’s inner-circle winter-bird technocrats -- which I prefer to ignore -- is the claim that if we lease Chittagong Port, Bangladesh will become Singapore.

Not quite. This port is just a port. It has no such deep connection with the country’s overall development. But leasing one port will increase our economic productivity, create connection with the global ecosystem, and reduce the price of your goods -- and that alone is good enough. 

We don’t need to become Singapore.

This Let's Become Singapore narrative we first heard in the Hasina era and it already set the country’s economic progress back by a decade. We don’t need the lure of becoming Singapore.

Therefore, from the citizens’ side, keeping productivity increase, knowledge transfer, and commodity prices in mind, the decision we need to back is: this port must be leased to DP World during this very unelected government’s tenure.

When an elected government comes, we will again be trapped in the mafia eco-system created by misguided leftists, business syndicates, wheeler-dealer politicians, and labour leaders.

I strongly stand in favour of immediate implementation of the DP World contract. This contract must be implemented right now. We cannot wait until an elected government arrives.

Period.