World Bank Interview with Ambassador Andrew Young

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz attended the 7^th Sullivan Summit on July 18, and delivered a keynote address.  The Sullivan Summits bring together the world’s political and business leaders, delegates representing national and international civil and multinational organizations, and members of academic institutions in order to focus attention and resources on Africa’s economic and social development. Their mission was inspired by Rev. Leon H. Sullivan’s belief that the development of Africa is a matter of global partnerships.

Interviewer:   Ambassador Young, while you’re here at the Sullivan Summit in Nigeria, what is the message you are delivering about Africa?

Ambassador Young: The message is that Africa is a continent with tremendous opportunity. It’s the part of a global economy that’s got to work if the rest of it is going to work. We compete with the Chinese, we compete with the Europeans, but Africa can absorb everything we can produce, and it has the mineral wealth and the human resources to pay for it. But somebody has to bring us all together, and that’s why we’re grateful that you and the World Bank are here

Interviewer:   What is the role of a multilateral institution like the World Bank and others?

Ambassador Young: We used to think that governments were important, and they are. But I was on the Banking Committee in Congress and was one of the early supporters of the World Bank because I grew up under the Marshall Plan, and I saw that when Europe couldn’t help itself, the World Bank was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development that really stabilized Europe and Asia, and they kind of chickened out when they got to Africa. And now finally we realize that if we don’t stabilize the entire planet, that the chaos that’s generated, the loss of business – I think the world is in a kind of social and economic balance, and for it to work everybody has to participate.

Interviewer:   Tell us a little bit about the spirit of the African people that you’re seeing as you travel.

Ambassador Young: I think I’m part of the African Diaspora, and the amazing thing to me is that whether it’s the genocide in Rwanda or the civil war in Nigeria or apartheid in South Africa, that there is an amazing resilience. There’s a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. They don’t forget, but they don’t let anything get them down. Atlanta talks about a city rising from the ashes, but the whole African continent seems to have struggled with some of the harshest conditions on the globe, and it has been a victim of some of the worst persecutions. If you think about what went on in the Congo under Leopold, it’s amazing that the Congo is able even to survive in the mess it’s in, but it’s still maybe the richest block of real estate on the planet, and we’ve got to find a way to intelligently develop it and help those people to realize their potential in order for us to realize our potential.

Interviewer:   One last question. Why should the average person leading a comfortable life in a rich developed country care about the future of Africa?

Ambassador Young:   I don’t think my life could be comfortable for ever. Unfortunately, I’m a capitalist. I was born in a free-enterprise economy, and you can’t stay still. You either have to grow or decline. And you can’t grow much more in Europe. The Europeans have reached a point where they’ve stopped our growth. The area where the growth potential is the greatest, and for me the easiest, is Africa. And I’d like to see our cities flourish. We’re not going to be able to compete with China if we’re producing just for Europe and China and Latin America, but if we start making trucks for Africa instead of just trying to make luxury automobiles, Africa could have sold every truck that Honda, General Motors, and Mercedes could make, but somebody has to finance the roads, somebody has to finance the mass transit. We probably shouldn’t build highways all over Africa. We probably should look at railroads. We probably should look at the kinds of vehicles that we use in our cities. But that’s too big for any single company, and I wish Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had set aside about $10 billion of theirs for a global infrastructure fund. There was a global infrastructure fund proposed by the President of Mitsubishi in Japan when I was in Congress in the seventies, that said that -- I think he said – that there were 50 places in the world where an infrastructure project of about $10 billion would solve the problems of the world. One of those was the tunnel under the English channel. Another sea-level Panama canal. He talked about a channel connecting Europe to Morocco under Gibraltar. There is, I understand, a lake under the Sahara desert finding a way to re-populate that lake and let the water come up. A channel across one of the peninsulas in Vietnam or Indonesia – somewhere around there – but all of them made sense and the ones that we’ve done managed to pay for themselves. I’d like to see a road from Luanda to Kinshasa, and another one from Luanda right on across the Caprivi Strip to Zambia and Zimbabwe. It would be better if that were the railroad, but there are big things that will make sense. We could have a game reserve that extended from Mozambique right over to Angola, where we could protect and preserve all of the wildlife forever, and it would generate tourism from all over the world. The world can be made to make sense if we quit thinking of the things that divide us and realize how we can be united in meeting the common good. No individual company can do that. No individual country can do that. But a multilateral institution that exists to make the world make sense, like the World Bank – and you’ve done a good job in Europe and you’ve kept Africa sustained, but we’ve got to have a takeover, and we’ve got to do it together,   and everybody will profit by whatever investment they make in making the world make sense.

Interviewer:   Thank you very much.