The good that men do lives after them, the evil is oft interred with their bones. Sorry about this twisting of the famous eulogy of Mark Antony about Julius Caesar. But I am going to take the liberty of giving a second twist to this immortal line by saying - The good that men do sometimes lives after them, but this good is oft interred with their bones.
I take this liberty because I want the world to know about a man and not to forget him after his passing away. A man I have known almost my lifetime and honestly hope his legacy lives on.
Dr. Shamsul Huda was a man out of his time in his devotion to his work and love for the country. He did not shine brightly in the limelight after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 because he lacked the skills of sycophancy. Maybe that was due to the strength of his character.
I am not going to splurge in his praise but be short and precise in the description of his character. In the last fifty or so years of my knowing him I can’t think of any flaw in his character or deviation from the respect and dignity of the top bureaucratic position he held in the country. I cannot say this about many of my other colleagues in the Civil Service who were swayed by the allurement of power and position as top bureaucrats.
Mr. Huda and I graduated from the same university in Upstate New York, Syracuse University. He was in the famous Maxwell School of Public Administration and I was in the School of Business. The quality of his academic achievement there won him the coveted position of Graduate Assistant to the Dean Professor Guthrie Birkhead. After completing his Doctorate in Public Administration, he returned back to serve his country in 1979.
Even though I stayed back in the US after completing my PhD a few years later, due to political circumstances and changes made in the code of conduct of Civil Servants (quite different the Civil Service of Pakistan that we had belonged to), I never said goodbye to my motherland. Shamsul Huda understood this quite well, but he had the ability and fortitude to resist the wrong, which many of us lacked.
He lived through the age of corruption and misuse of power, never compromising, and diplomatic in his approach. A person of his capacity and honesty should have made it to the most prominent echelon of the Service very quickly, but he never compromised his conscience and stayed away from the seats of power. He worked as Secretary in many Ministries – not the most prominent ones. He was tipped to become the Governor of Bangladesh Bank at some stage of his career but that did not materialise.
I had the privilege of working with Dr. Huda as a World Bank and UN consultant over many years. Needless to say, I was amazed by his sense of duty and devotion to his work, when I watched him closely. To mention one such situation, when I was working as the head of the National Water Policy Development Team on behalf of the World Bank, he was the Secretary of the Ministry of Water Resources.
I saw him much closer at work than in my earlier association with him as a friend. This was the first time in the history of the organisation that a formal policy was being formulated with the help of myriads of foreign and Bangladeshi experts.
Dr. Huda used to spend most the evening till night with me, after work, discussing the extremely complicated nature of the issues confronting water management in Bangladesh. His knowledge of the sector even in small matters was astounding.
My hats off to the only Civil Servant that I knew in the country who would show so much concern and responsibility about the myriads of problems facing the country both domestic and international. During his tenure in the Ministry, the country enacted its first National Water Policy and National Water Management Plan, acclaimed by all the international aid organisations in the world.
I can go on forever recounting my experience with him over the long period of our lives, but need to end here with the saying: “A life of honour is not measured by material wealth or social status, but by the impact one has on the lives of others and the legacy one leaves behind.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
* Dr. Yusuf Choudhry, is a retired Professor of Management and an ex CSP officer, living in Washington DC