The most authentically Bangladeshi experience is not the serene Sundarbans or the rhythmic chaos of a rickshaw-painted street. It is the glorious, soul-crushing bedlam of Dhaka's Shahjalal International Airport at peak hours.
This is not merely a place; it is a state of being. A thermodynamic marvel in which a thousand hopeful individuals condense into a single, sweating organism with one shared goal: to breach the event horizon of the immigration counter. By one airport-services firm's estimate, the process takes 15 to 30 minutes on a normal day and 30 to 45 at peak.
Recently, as a man's elbow became intimately acquainted with my ribcage, I had an epiphany. This is not just bad logistics. It is a perfect, almost artistic, representation of our national condition. We are a country perpetually in a departure lounge, forever announcing our final boarding call for prosperity, yet never quite managing to close the door and take off.
Why do we, a people of undeniable resilience, keep squandering the ticket to our own ascent?
An allegory with bad air conditioning
Consider the scene. A student with a scholarship to Stanford, her future shimmering just beyond the customs desk. A migrant worker, whose remittances fuel our economy, trying to get back to the job that keeps the lights on. Their potential is palpable.
Yet they are trapped in a system designed by a satirist. The rules are opaque, the line is a myth, and the only currency that matters is aggression and fatalism. When a system is fundamentally untrustworthy, the rational response is to abandon collective cooperation and push.
It is not that we are undisciplined; it is that we have been perfectly trained by our environment. The airport is not an exception. It is the rule.
Exit the airport, enter the mirror
Step outside, and the allegory does not dissipate; it changes scale. Welcome to Dhaka's traffic: the airport queue projected onto a metropolitan canvas.
Studies estimate that congestion squanders millions of working hours every day. A 2018 study by BUET's Accident Research Institute put the annual loss at Tk37,000 crore and estimated that cutting congestion by just 60% could have saved Tk22,000 crore. But that is only the monetary cost. The true cost is psychological: the slow-burn acceptance that this is just how things are.
Every car is a sovereign state, every rickshaw a declaration of independence. The absurdity shows in the numbers: a mere 6% of Dhaka's population uses private cars, yet by one estimate they occupy 76% of the road space. We are all going nowhere fast, but some of us are doing so in far greater comfort, and at far greater collective expense.
The chaos of the airport and the gridlock of the streets are siblings, born of the same parentage: a spectacular failure of planning and a political economy that profits from the friction.
Then there is the banking sector. How else to explain the magnificent pile of bad loans? Non-performing loans stood at a staggering Tk6.07 lakh crore as of June 2026, roughly 33% of all loans. The six state-owned commercial banks alone hold about Tk1.48 lakh crore of them, with Janata Bank responsible for more than half: Tk75,396 crore.
This is where the airport's 'VIP culture' metastasises into a national cancer. The system works, but only for a select few.
A historical hangover (and a modern debt trap)
How did we get here? The British Raj was built for extraction, not efficiency. Then came 1971. Our glorious independence was also a decapitation. The Pakistani regime deliberately targeted our intellectuals, doctors and engineers — the architects of a future state. We won the war, but we lost a generation of builders.
The institutional void was filled not by meritocracy but by a political culture in which loyalty trumped competence, and the state became a pie to be divided.
This created the Bangladesh Paradox. Our garment industry and NGOs thrive because they answer to an external master: the international buyer, the donor. They must be efficient to survive. The state, however, answers to a captive master: us. When the cost of exit is impossibly high, the incentive to improve plummets. Why fix the queue if no one can leave the airport?
We keep applying technical solutions to political problems. We built a new terminal, a facility that cost about Tk21,600 crore and is, by one MP's account, 99.91% complete, yet is still not operational. The government is now seeking an additional Tk902 crore to finish the work. We buy new aircraft but do not fix the governance that will operate them. It is a fresh coat of paint on a termite-infested wall.
The paradox has a chilling financial metaphor. Our aviation sector has been crushed by a debt trap built on compounding penalties. Private carriers such as GMG Airlines, United Airways and Regent Airways have already folded, unable to pay their dues.
The total owed to the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh stands at Tk7,351 crore, of which 78%, or about Tk5,734 crore, is pure surcharge, the product of a punitive 72% annual penalty. This was not a policy for recovery; it was a design for failure.
Against this backdrop of dysfunction and debt, we have now made a staggering decision: a $3.7 billion deal with Boeing for 14 new aircraft, signed in April. Months later, US President Donald Trump wrote to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman: "Boeing will not let you down, and I will not forget." In September, Biman signed for 11 more Boeing aircraft.
The Europeans are lobbying hard. The EU Ambassador has publicly urged the government to weigh Airbus's offer and decide on commercial merit. At home, a Supreme Court lawyer's legal notice has challenged the deal's transparency, asking why no open tender was held.
And through it all, the question no one is answering: Where is the business case?
Biman operates just 19 aircraft and 22 international destinations, down from as many as 29, while foreign airlines carry about 65% of international passengers. Yet the government talks of needing 70 to 80 aircraft. This is not a strategy; it is a geopolitical gambit with no pilot in the cockpit.
The vicious cycle (or, why we can't have nice things)
This brings us to the heart of the squander. We do not fix things because, perversely, chaos is functional for a powerful minority.
Fixing the airport would dismantle an ecosystem of "expediting fees" and patronage. Solving traffic would break the transport syndicates. Cleaning up the banks would mean the elite actually repaying their loans. And grounding the Boeing deal in commercial reality would forgo geopolitical prestige and patronage opportunities.
There is no political incentive to create a rules-based system, because the current one is a perfectly efficient machine for generating private wealth for a select few.
We keep applying technical solutions to political problems. We built a new terminal, a facility that cost about Tk21,600 crore and is, by one MP's account, 99.91% complete, yet is still not operational. The government is now seeking an additional Tk902 crore to finish the work. We buy new aircraft but do not fix the governance that will operate them. It is a fresh coat of paint on a termite-infested wall.
The glimmer beyond the tarmac
So, are we doomed to eternal queuing? Not necessarily. But the fix will not come from a new policy document. It must come from a fundamental rewiring of our social contract.
There is a glimmer of hope: in January, the government cut the maximum airline surcharge from 72% to 14.25%. It is a small admission that the system was broken by design — a crack we must widen.
It requires us to move from being passengers in a chaotic terminal to being shareholders in a functioning nation. The vibrant energy in that airport queue is our greatest asset. It is the same energy that built our garment industry and makes our diaspora thrive. It is the fuel. But right now, that fuel is burning in a gridlocked engine.
The question is not whether we have the potential to take flight. The evidence is in the faces of the people struggling to board their planes. The real question is whether we can finally decide to build a runway worthy of them.
Our eternal boarding call does not have to be a joke; it can become an announcement of arrival.
But first, we have to clear the gate.
Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He can be reached at [email protected].