|
With his decade-long World Bank presidency nearing an end and a new role as Middle East special envoy before him, James Wolfensohn on Thursday sought to ease fears successor Paul Wolfowitz would force a US agenda on the developing world, reports Reuters. Wolfowitz, the deputy US defense secretary chosen by President George W. Bush to take over the World Bank, won unanimous backing from its board despite misgivings among some member nations about his role as architect of the Iraq war. Wolfensohn gave his successor a firm endorsement, saying he would be an able leader as the bank seeks to boost aid budgets, forgive poor country debt and rethink lending to mid-sized emerging countries with access to other funds. "I think Paul Wolfowitz is going to do a very good job. I do not believe he is coming in with an agenda that is unilateral. I think he wants to do this job well," Wolfensohn said ahead of the World Bank spring meetings. "He'd be crazy if he took this job with anything but good motives, and I believe he has those motives, and I think he has the capacity to learn." Agence France Presse adds that Wolfensohn acknowledged there was some disquiet about the arrival of Wolfowitz, a "neoconservative" who played a lead role in pushing for war in Iraq, among World Bank staff and in the wider international community. But he said that since Wolfowitz's nomination to the post last month, the two men had spent many hours discussing the bank's multi-billion-dollar development work. "We have not agreed on many issues in the past. But on this point, I think he will do an excellent job," Wolfensohn said. Wolfowitz, a former ambassador to Indonesia and State Department official, has vowed to uphold the bank's "noble mission" of eradicating poverty when he replaces Wolfensohn, who is stepping down after a decade in the job. Wolfowitz said that debt relief for the world's poorest nations was a pressing issue in his new in-tray, along with a September summit of the United Nations devoted to the Millennium Development Goals. The news agency adds that campaigners are pushing hard for Wolfowitz to stick to the anti-poverty policy path laid out by Wolfensohn. "Wolfensohn leaves a mixed legacy," Oxfam International advocacy director Bernice Romero said. "There has been clear progress on education but harmful conditions on bank loans continue to undermine governments and perpetuate poverty. Under Wolfowitz, the only politics the bank should be involved in is ending world poverty. This means providing aid without harmful conditions and using his influence to force rich countries to fulfill their promises to the poor." AFX Asia further reports that Wolfensohn said staffers should allay their fears about his successor Wolfowitz and give him six months to prove himself. Some observers inside and outside the multilateral institution, believe Wolfowitz represents a view that if the US will lead, the rest of the world will follow. "It is true that there are fears. But I'd give him six months and I'd listen to him and I'd work with him and I think he'll be an excellent leader for the World Bank," Wolfensohn said. He added that the biggest challenge for Wolfowitz would be to increase the scale of successful World Bank projects. "We've got hundreds of projects...where we can say we helped 50,000 people or 500,000 school kids or a million people with AIDS - and you feel terrific about it. But then you discover that there are 40 million people with AIDS or that the real challenge is one billion two million people earning under a dollar a day," he said. "How do you take whatever money and process you have and make sure that you can keep up with the monumental challenge of numbers? This jump between feeling good about a project and taking it to scale and making it sustainable is really the cutting edge of where we are at. It is certainly his [Wolfowitz’s] big-challenge.” |
RSS