Bangladesh's Gilgamesh problem

Highlights:

• Technological and institutional progress often fails to serve the public good
• Bangladesh's watchdog institutions increasingly imitate the power they were meant to check
• Oversight bodies like the ACC, Parliament, and Bangladesh Bank show political capture
• Reformers and civil society risk co-option through access and prestige
• Real reform needs narrative renewal, not just technical or legal fixes
• Upcoming elections test whether voters value restraint over spectacle and proximity to power

In Power and Progress, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson revisit the Epic of Gilgamesh to illustrate a timeless dilemma: technological and institutional advances do not automatically serve the public good. Gilgamesh, the ancient king of Uruk, ruled with unchecked power. To restrain him, the gods created Enkidu—a wild man meant to challenge tyranny. But Enkidu was seduced. The opposition was absorbed. The counterforce became complicit.

This, Acemoglu and Johnson argue, is the "Gilgamesh problem": institutions designed to check power often end up imitating it. Over time, they forget their origin story. Everyone wants to be Gilgamesh. In Bangladesh, this metaphor is not just illustrative—it is diagnostic. Our institutions, born to resist excess, have too often been tempted into mimicry.

From guardian to mimic

Consider the institutions meant to play the Enkidu role:

The Anti-Corruption Commission, created in 2004 to combat graft, now evokes irony. Since a 2013 amendment requiring government permission to investigate officials, the ACC has been seen less as a watchdog and more as a lapdog. It growls occasionally, but only when permitted—and never at the powerful. Its leash is held by the very hands it was meant to bite.

Parliament, structurally empowered to oversee the executive, has become a stage for scripted rituals. Budget sessions pass with minimal scrutiny. Committees malfunction by default. Opposition voices are either absent or performative. Parliament reenacts Gilgamesh—not by wielding power, but by echoing it.

Infograph: TBS

Bangladesh Bank, once a guardian of financial integrity, has drifted into political orbit. In 2013, it approved nine new banks based on proximity to power. Regulatory forbearance—on loan rescheduling, capital adequacy, and enforcement—has been selectively applied. A 2025 ACC probe implicated three former governors in major financial scandals, from the Hallmark scam to the reserve heist.

The Gilgamesh problem is not confined to formal institutions. Professionals, media, and civil society—those outside the state—are not immune. Many enter public life with reformist zeal, only to be seduced by access, prestige, and proximity to power. Policy briefs become endorsements. Silence becomes strategy. The wildness of civic resistance is tamed by the lure of belonging. Enkidu's temptation lives not just in institutions, but in us.

This is the imitation game. Oversight becomes performance. Resistance becomes ritual. Reformers become reenactors. The system doesn't crush dissent—it co-opts it.

Rewriting the narrative

Escaping the Gilgamesh trap requires more than technical fixes. Yes, we need tenure limits, rotating leadership, digital transparency, and tamper-proof procurement. But these are insufficient without a deeper shift in how reform is imagined and narrated.

The real crisis is narrative amnesia. Institutions forget why they were born. Reformers forget who they were meant to challenge. As Robert Shiller's Narrative Economics reminds us, behavior is shaped not just by incentives, but by stories. Narratives that resonate emotionally—through fear, hope, pride, or injustice—spread faster and stick longer. If a story feels true, it becomes true in behavior.

Reform narratives often fail to "go viral" because they revolve around elite validation—prestige, access, and influence—rather than the gritty realities of performance. Competence is not inherently valued; it is conditionally rewarded when it serves the machinery of power. Reformers are celebrated not for their independence, but for their utility. Integrity becomes ornamental—lionized in speeches, sidelined in systems. The architecture of incentives rewards loyalty over autonomy, and performance only when it reinforces the status quo.

This is why many Enkidus drift—not because they lack conviction, but because conviction without complicity is like lungs without air: vital in theory, suffocated in practice. The system doesn't extinguish reformers—it isolates them, starves their agency, and rewards those who perform reform rather than pursue it. Reform becomes a script, not a struggle. And resistance—whether to co-optation, selective enforcement, or narrative drift—becomes a liability. It invites exclusion, reputational risk, or quiet retaliation. In such a system, even the well-intentioned learn to survive by mimicking power rather than challenging it.

Power will always tempt. That is its nature: seductive, transactional, self-preserving. The challenge is not to moralise this temptation, but to recode the system so that restraint is rewarded and mimicry is punished. The question is not how to find the perfect Enkidus. It is how to design systems that anticipate their temptation—and punish betrayal. No country can purge every Enkidu. But we can build firewalls—legal, institutional, reputational—so that collusion is never a dominant strategy.

The battle of Enkidus

In our own epic, the Interim Government was meant to be the Enkidu who cannot be tempted—interim by design, born of necessity, tasked with tempering excess. The jury is still out as they approach their exit. Will tomorrow's Enkidus remember why they were lifted to power—or will they, like so many before, mistake intimacy with Gilgamesh for destiny?

As Bangladesh approaches the February 2026 elections, the stage is set not for a clash between Gilgamesh and Enkidu—but between rival Enkidus, each claiming the mantle of restraint, reform, and renewal. Yet beneath the surface, the risk remains that Gilgamesh—unchecked power, transactional politics, and institutional capture—may re-emerge, not through brute force, but through the fissures in the process. When guardians turn on each other, Gilgamesh wins by default. The danger is not just who wins, but what is normalised in the pursuit of victory.

Voters must be aware of the allure of staged reform—where grand gestures substitute for genuine change, and political theater masks institutional decay. Not all who speak of renewal intend to deliver it. The choreography of reform—press conferences, pledges, nominations—can distract from the absence of structural accountability.  

Bangladesh's lesson is not that we repeat history—but that we forget we ever tried to learn from it. The ballot is not just a choice—it is a test of memory. It asks whether we remember why our institutions were born, what they were meant to restrain, and how easily they can be seduced. Voters must demand systems that reward restraint over proximity, integrity over spectacle. The task is not to choose the loudest Enkidu, but to protect the conditions that keep Gilgamesh in check.

Zahid Hussain is a former chief economist of  The World Bank, Dhaka Office