Celia W. Dugger
The New York Times
May 24, 2006
Washington:

At the opening of the annual spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund last week, a small group of protesters at a news conference chanted: “Corporate corruption, who can we thank? The IMF and the World Bank!”

In less than a minute, security guards shushed the protesters and hustled them out. That the moment fizzled so quickly was a sign of the surprising lack of controversy surrounding the 10-month tenure of Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank, one of the most important anti-poverty institutions.

Wolfowitz, a former Pentagon official who became a lightning rod for criticism of the Iraq war and who was mocked by the filmmaker Michael Moore in “Fahrenheit 9/11” for fussing with his hair, has defused much of the opposition from advocacy groups.

Early in his tenure, he worked behind the scenes to push for debt relief, a cause popularized by the rock musician Bono. At the spring meeting, he announced that he had enough votes from bank shareholders to approve $37 billion in debt relief to 17 of the world’s poorest countries, mostly in Africa.

“He didn’t have to do that,” said Max Lawson, a policy adviser with Oxfam.

Wolfowitz has laid claim to the mantle of anti-corruption crusader. In recent months, he has blocked or canceled more than $1 billion in loans to a range of developing countries. But he has done it in a way that appealed to both conservatives, who worry that aid is disappearing down a rathole, and to anti-corporate activists who fear it is being stolen from the poor by corrupt rulers and the business executives who bribe them.

He has also on occasion shown a willingness to nip the hand of the Bush administration that used to feed him, a tendency that has lessened suspicions that his appointment to head the World Bank would simply impose U.S. interests. At a news conference at the spring meeting, he gently chided the United States for the relatively small sums it gives to help educate the 100 million children in the developing world who are not in school.

Certainly there is harsh criticism of Wolfowitz, but it seems tempered by a sense that his approach offers a chance for change at the World Bank, a lumbering institution often berated as secretive, bureaucratic and ineffective in dispensing billions of dollars in loans to poor countries each year at very low interest.

A sign of the new attitude toward Wolfowitz can be seen in the reaction by India, the bank’s largest borrower, to his decision to hold up $660 million in lending to support India’s health programs for women, children and victims of tuberculosis. He cited corruption in drug procurement as the reason.

That action, which India’s health minister, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss, called unfair, might once have prompted India to spurn Wolfowitz and his loans. But the new India, deeply engaged with the United States, is trying to accommodate him.

“I’ve done everything the World Bank asked,” Ramadoss said by telephone. “I have blacklisted all the companies they wanted. I’ve suspended officials there at that point in time.”

As well as highlighting his anti-corruption theme, Wolfowitz emphasized another cause during the spring meeting: education. He appeared on a panel with Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister, to discuss educational aid.

Brown, who announced this month that Britain was committing $15 billion to education in the coming decade, four times what it spent in the past decade, said, “It is one of the world’s greatest scandals that must now be addressed that 100 million children are not going to school today.”

Okonjo-Iweala began by telling how she had recently adopted a 17-year-old girl who had never had a chance to get an education, and who is now being privately tutored. She said children needed to be able to read and write if they were ever to escape poverty and invited donors to contribute to help education in the developing world.

When the panel was asked who the laggards were among the donors, the audience tittered, and Wolfowitz took the question. He praised the British and the Dutch for their outstanding contributions. As for the United States, he said, it has raised its spending on education from about $100 million in 2002 to $260 million in 2004.

“If you stop and think about it, that’s about $1 per capita, whereas I think the U.K. number is now up to $20 per capita,” he said. “So the U.S. could do a lot more.” And then Wolfowitz, who can be a phlegmatic speaker, seemed to catch fire.

“What I would like to emphasize is that this is not just charity,” he said. “The world will be a better place – we will all benefit – when these kids are able to be productive, contributing members of society. It’s something they deserve, it’s something we owe to them, but frankly, it’s also something we owe to ourselves.”