**This is the penultimate year to the new millennium. Let the top political leadership of the country start being statesmanly as distinguished from what has been a blind pursuit of partisanship across the board. That will inspire everyone to do his or her duty to the country. And, then we would be spared the embarrassment of being a total stranger to the 21st Century.

Floods in Bangladesh and China, Hurricane Mitch in Central America and earthquake in Afghanistan — the outgoing year has had quite an encounter with natural disasters in their ’unprecedented’ manifestations. In the reckoning of the World Food Programme (WFP), however, it is the Bangladesh flood which stands out as the most devastating of calamities in 1998. Its unusually long duration made it the worst-of-the-century not just nationally for Bangladesh but on global scale too.

To rank high on the list of calamitous visitations may not be a matter of pride but what must be so is the wonderful feat of survival the people of Bangladesh recorded amidst a stupendous adversity. Their courage and fortitude, endurance and resilience, self-reliance and Robinson Crusoe-like invincible spirit stood them in good stead, in a scenario that was infinitely more challenging than anything they had known before by way of natural disasters. Marooned, distressed, unsuccoured for days on end with two-thirds of the country rapidly going under water, they stood their ground with fellow-feeling, ingenuity and forbearance. The floods in a way resurrected the mettle our people had shown during the Liberation War — minus, of course, the armed valour part of it. Our hats off to them as we draw up a balance sheet of the year gone by.

The Daily Star in due acknowledgment of and admiration for their manifest spirit of invincibility against stunning odds, has adjudged the people of Bangladesh as its Man Of The Year for 1998. What now remains for the government and political parties to do is to harness that inner strength of our people by throwing such challenges before them as they can readily identify themselves with and respond to with spontaneous vigour. Grassroots participation based on the proven assumption that It is the poor who hold the key to the alleviation of poverty will have to be ensured.

While our people came out of the last year's natural catastrophe with flying colours in terms of the human spirit, it is the economy that still looks misshapen after two and a half months since it took a tumble in the floods. There have been management and input or service delivery flaws.

The time-table set for VGF card distribution and disbursement of bank loans could not be maintained. Also, distribution of agricultural inputs and the start of the Food-for-Work programme were delayed.

The pace of agricultural revival has been extremely slow, industrial production has slumped, exports are down, foreign remittances are in the throes of uncertainty, revenue collection has dropped and inflation is up. The complacence that the effects of East and South East Asian financial turmoil will not catch up with us is wearing thin if the marked fall in export-earning is any indicator. A demand recession has set in globally. We need girding up the loans.

An Investment-driven economic breakthrough looks like a far cry with indecision still marking the gas block allotments.

The administrative, police, labour union, financial sector and student politics reform agenda remain on the back-burner as campus violence, bureaucratic inaccountability, police and labour excesses, loan default, scandalous business deals and extortionlsm rule the roost making a mockery of governance as a whole.

National politics is in total disarray. As a matter of fact, the hiatus between the ruling party and the opposition that had been growing until the other day through the confrontational brand of politics pursued by both sides has now become almost unbridgeable with a sharp polarisation occurring across the political divide. With an alliance between Ershad-led Jatiya party and the mainstream opposition BNP in sight, and AL leader Sheikh Hasina making no bones about her feelings there, the nation seems headed for a stormy and eventful political future.

This is the penultimate year to the new millennium. Let the top political leadership of the country start being statesmanly as distinguished from what has been a blind pursuit of partisanship across the board. That will inspire everyone to do his or her duty to the country. And, then we would be spared the embarrassment of being a total stranger to the 21 st Century.