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          ARE we reaching that critical stage when the country will need to negotiate and receive foreign aid to pay back its international loans along with interest or the so-called service charges? Recent reports have indicated that the foreign aid flow in the first six months of the current fiscal year totalled at $488 million compared to $815 million in the corresponding period of the last fiscal year. The over-all flow has recorded a significant 40 per cent decline. But the net foreign aid received in the period was actually $237 million as the country had to pay $251 million to the donors as instalments of previously received loans, which have already become due for repayment with the interest or service charges.
Every package of foreign aid received or being received has a repayment schedule. The World Bank loans are extended on terms settled through mutual negotiations. The repayment schedules of these loans usually include a grace period. Bangladesh will complete 35 years of its independent existence on the ensuing independence day on the 26th of the current month. But its effective age for the purpose of loan repayment is about 33 years, as it began to receive foreign loans from around 1973. That means, foreign aid packages received from the dawn of our independence have begun to be due for repayment, if not already repaid, and the amount to be repaid in the subsequent years will increasingly grow bigger.
One estimate is that Bangladesh will have to spend as much as $1.25 billion from 2010 on account of debt servicing. As the liability will progressively increase, it will create a tremendous pressure on the national budget. It may even become unmanageable unless our receipt of foreign exchange as national income goes up proportionately to offset that pressure. While planning repayment of foreign loans, we may not forget that the flow of foreign aid greatly increased from the second half of 1970s and then recorded steep rises, which means that the liability of repayment will also steeply rise in the corresponding manner onward from 2010. Is there any possibility of debt servicing being a very difficult problem?
The plain fact is that, foreign aid or no aid, without the remittances of our expatriate workers this country is still utterly poor and would have become bankrupt long ago. If their remittances do not remain steady and record rises, indeed loan repayment may become a serious problem. But these workers often receive ill-treatment at home and abroad. Bad treatment at their places of employment abroad though not alright, may be tolerated to the extent it is found incorrigible. Is it that people who are beaten by fate, acquire their fortune always through hard toil? What about ill-treatment at home? Many officers and employees of the pertinent department of the government dealing with foreign employment have become individually richer than most of the individual expatriate workers in ways which are not fair in the intervening years since Bangladeshi workers began to seek fortune abroad. That's one aspect which is definitely not at all alright from the point of view of good governance. We should give our full attention to it in seeking to keep the remittances steady.
But we need to recognise that it is not at all safe for any government to bring into consideration the remittances of the vulnerable expatriate workers in long-term budget planning. This is more true when it comes to the question of meeting international obligations. When their places of employment are not under our control, we should always suspect that a little change of attitude or policy of the employers may drive away majority of our expatriate workers home. That is what has already happened on a limited scale in case of employment opportunities in Malaysia and, to a degree, in South Korea. We should neither pin much hope on the prospect of free movement of natural persons as per mode four of the WTO agreement on services at this point of time when nations are seen to be protectionist when it comes to preserving their own interests. The recent furious reaction of some West European nations to Indian-owned Mittal steel's bid to take over a Belgian steel company and the reaction of many Americans to Dubai's D.P. world's bid to take over a British company having management contract of six US ports in its east coast exemplify it. Until a nation has enough muscle to flex, like enormous economic strength and group support on the world scene, globalisation seemingly does not automatically confer what it deserves. When immigration laws are being redrafted to virtually seal the borders of the developed countries for would-be immigrants in the name of war on terror, what could be the prospect of free movement of natural persons?
On setting aside the expatriate workers' remittances for purpose of a realistic assessment of our economic situation, it will become evident that we are not in a good economic situation. It is time when the ministry of finance should come up with a statement disclosing the figures of foreign debt repayment liabilities of the next two decades so that our people can grasp the magnitude of this particular problem and their responsibilities of citizenship in this regard. Absolute transparency on the matter should be permitted recognising that keeping the figures of growing debt servicing liabilities as secret will ultimately serve neither the government nor the country nor its people.
The disclosure of the growing debt servicing liabilities will induce at least some of our people, such as economists and civil society members including former senior civil servants, to come up with suggestions on how to improve the economic performance and repay our national liabilities. While preparing this important statement, the government should see to it that state-sponsored companies and autonomous bodies that have received foreign loans against government guarantees on the condition of repaying the loans by them individually abide by that term. Any default by them will automatically obligate the ministry of finance to repay such loans, and the exercise of preparing the proposed statement for public consumption will enable the government to recollect the repayment term of each and every foreign aid package and to remind the pertinent authorities about their obligations. It will enable the government to enforce some kind of accountability for performance of the government-sponsored companies and the autonomous bodies. Simultaneously, there will be public pressure on them to be result-oriented and show improvement. There are some instances of such companies which received foreign aid on government guarantees on the condition of repayment by them individually but have subsequently again received foreign aid to keep themselves running. It is alleged that even performance indicators set for some of these companies by the government and the donors were not brought into picture while seeking and negotiating fresh loans.
Every ministry and its officers concerned should be made answerable for default in not ensuring that the terms of foreign aid packages meant for the ministry or any organisation under it could be honoured without having to transfer the responsibility of repayment to the ministry of finance. It will bring some official and public pressure upon the ministries and their officers to regularly monitor the performance of the organisations under them. Unless we keep our own house in order, the donors will continue to dictate us terms and we will be always in the embarrassing position of having to accept their terms whether or not the terms are advantageous or beneficial for us. But the worst thing could be that we will find it hard to repay our increasing loan liabilities.