Awami League general secretary Obaidul Quader on Monday urged the country’s people not to get confused by the deliberate propaganda of communal forces.
‘The communal forces that want to see the country as a backward one are carrying out intentional propaganda against the country. I am calling upon the country’s people not to be misled by their propaganda,’ he told a press conference at his secretariat office in Dhaka.
Obaidul, also the road transport and bridges minister, said that the Bangladesh government had taken various precautionary measures to address the negative impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war, the economic blockade, and the price hike of oil, gas, and fertilisers in the international market.
Many countries across the globe are struggling to deal with intolerable and skyrocketing inflation, while the inflation rates in the developed world are showing the severity of the global economic setback, he said.
The AL general secretary said that inflation in Bangladesh was 7.56 per cent last June, while it was 9.1 per cent in the United States, 9.4 per cent in the United Kingdom, 8.9 per cent in Germany, 15.9 per cent in Russia, 78.6 per cent in Turkey, 9.4 per cent in the Netherlands, 39.9 per cent in Sri Lanka and 21.3 per cent in Pakistan.
Many are trying to mislead people inside the country by talking about inflation, he said, adding that inflation remains at a relatively tolerable level in the country after prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s government took precautionary measures to contain it.
Obaidul said that an identified quarter was spreading propaganda saying that a power and energy crisis gripped the country. In fact, he said, the world’s energy supply chain has become volatile at the time of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war after the global coronavirus pandemic.
Stating that over 90 per cent of countries in the world depend on imports for primary energy, the minister said that as an importing country, this situation put an adverse impact on Bangladesh too.
The energy crisis continues in almost all countries in the world, including western ones, at this moment, and they have drastically cut energy and power consumption to cope with the situation, he said.
He added that power production had also declined in many developed countries, resulting in an inevitable impact on global economies and production systems.
Referring to a recent headline of UK-based daily — Evening Standard — that ‘London narrowly avoided blackout as electricity prices surged last week’, Obaidul said that the report of the newspaper highlighted that the UK was forced to pay 5,000 per cent higher than the typical price for electricity to prevent a power blackout in south-east London.
He quoted a statement by New York City mayor Eric Adams as saying, ‘We are in a financial crisis like you can never imagine....Wall Street is collapsing, we are in recession’.
The AL general secretary paid tribute to all the martyrs of the August 15 carnage, including Bangladesh’s founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and remembered the memory of all the martyrs with due respect.
