Fat Negress Wants To Be Head Of WORLD BANK! Can You Imagine?

[Chris Crispy]

NIGERIA is still among the world's most corrupt countries. Huge
petroleum profits going to the ruling class, while millions starve and
die of treatable tropical diseases.

And with China lurking as Nigeria's chief trade suitor, things aren't
likely to improve.

Placing the "advantages" of the World Bank in the hands of this well-
fed native Negress would be like giving D.C. crack-smoker Marion Barry
oversight of the city's income tax audit division.

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"Will Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala break America’s hold on the World Bank?"

By Brad Plumer
April 14, 2012

The first time Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala ever had to convince Barack Obama
of anything was back in 2005.

At the time, Obama was an ambitious young senator from Illinois with a
keen interest in foreign affairs. Okonjo-Iweala was Nigeria’s blunt-
speaking finance minister, traversing the globe to convince the
world’s wealthiest nations that they should ease her country’s debt
burden.

“Everybody was saying that this could never be done . . . that it
would never happen,” Okonjo-Iweala recounted at an April event in
Washington. “We went up to the Hill and there was a certain senator,
Barack Obama” — long deadpan pause — “who was among those who were
skeptical.”

Eventually, Obama — and the rest of the world — would agree with her.
Nigeria paid $12 billion up front to win a further $18 billion in debt
relief, and while questions still linger about how good a deal Nigeria
got, it removed a major obstacle to the country’s economic growth. She
cites the episode as an example of her “persuasive powers.”

Seven years later, that young senator is president, and Okonjo-Iweala,
now 57, is using her powers on an even more far-fetched idea. She’s
making a bid to lead the World Bank, which last year loaned $57
billion to help poor countries develop. But by tradition, the
presidency has always gone to the U.S. nominee, and Obama has made his
pick: Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim. As the bank’s board of
directors prepares to make a final decision next week, it’s clear that
selecting a woman from Africa would be unprecedented.

Yet Okonjo-Iweala hasn’t relented. She insists that she is, by far,
the most qualified candidate, having worked at the World Bank for
decades, including a stint as its second in command. She has adoring
fans — there’s a #TeamNgozi Twitter hashtag — and has garnered support
from opinion leaders such as the editors of the Economist and PIMCO
head Mohamed El-Erian. The New York Times editorial board, which has
called for a more open selection process, urged the World Bank’s board
to “take a serious look” at Okonjo-Iweala.

What’s perhaps most surprising about Okonjo-Iweala’s insurgent
campaign, however, is that she isn’t proposing an overhaul in how the
Bank does business — apart from the way in which the president is
selected. One senior bank official calls her “the consummate insider.”
Unlike Kim, who has a long history of public health activism, Okonjo-
Iweala seems more content to propose modest tweaks to the institution.

In many ways, then, the most radical thing about Okonjo-Iweala’s
candidacy is the fact of the candidacy itself.

Living poverty

The details of Okonjo-Iweala’s biography go a long way toward
explaining why she generates such enthusiasm. She was born in 1954,
when Nigeria was still under British colonial control, and reportedly
learned English by reading books such as “Treasure Island.”

After the British left in 1960, her life grew tumultuous. In 1967, the
southeastern provinces of Nigeria, including Okonjo-Iweala’s home
Delta State, declared independence as the Republic of Biafra. A
bloody, three-year civil war ensued, leaving 1 million dead. Her
father, a distinguished economist, joined the Biafran army and her
family subsisted through the war, she said, on one meal a day. In a
2005 interview with the Guardian, Okonjo-Iweala recounted how, when
she was 15, she carried her malaria-stricken 3-year-old sister four
miles to find a doctor.

“I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water . . . what it
means when people are poor and don’t have enough to eat. It’s not
enough to say you know about poverty,” Okonjo-Iweala said recently,
explaining why she should lead the World Bank. “You have to live it.”

When she was 18, Okonjo-Iweala moved to the United States to study
economics at Harvard and MIT. She went on to join the World Bank in
1982, climbing through the ranks by shifting between jobs and across
regions: as an agricultural economist focusing on Africa; country
director for Mongolia, Malaysia, and Cambodia; and deputy vice
president for the Middle Eastern region.

Most World Bank affiliates who have spoken out publicly on Okonjo-
Iweala’s behalf — including 39 former staffers who wrote an open
letter praising her “deep experience in international and national
issues of economic management” — know her from this period. Among
other things, she co-authored an influential report on how the bank
should operate in fragile states that have been racked by conflict
(known as “low-income states under stress”), where the bank’s
government partners were either dysfunctional or nonexistent.

Economists say that Okonjo-Iweala comes at development from a fairly
mainstream perspective. “Many international organizations, like the
United Nations, take a very state-centric view of development,” said
William Easterly, a development economist at New York University and
former bank staffer. “But the World Bank tends to see a more balanced
role for markets and states, and I’d associate Okonjo-Iweala with this
view.”

Okonjo-Iweala’s best chance to put her views into practice outside the
bank came in 2003, when Olusegun Obasanjo, then president of Nigeria,
asked her to work as his finance minister. (Obasanjo had been
impressed with a brief she wrote about economic reform.) At the time,
Nigeria had just emerged from a three-decade military dictatorship
that had racked up $35 billion in debt and transformed the country
into what the anti-corruption group Transparency International deemed
one of the most corrupt places on Earth. Okonjo-Iweala’s task, in
addition to crafting the country’s budgetary priorities, was to clean
up the wreckage.

By most accounts, she threw herself into the task, sifting through
lists of civil service workers to cull phantom employees from the
government payroll, firing officials, and unlinking the nation’s
budget from the price of oil, Nigeria’s main export. Okonjo-Iweala
could claim modest success. By the time she left Obasanjo’s
administration in 2007, Nigeria was ranked 147th of 179 countries on
corruption — moving ahead of Bangladesh and Togo, but still behind
countries such as Russia and Yemen.

On economics, meanwhile, her record received mixed reviews. Western
economists praised her efforts to kick-start Nigeria’s private sector.
Domestic critics were often less patient: Ni­ger­ian columnist Sonala
Olumhense, for instance, recalls Okonjo-Iweala’s unfulfilled promise,
in 2005, to create 7 million jobs. “It was the original 419,”
Olumhense scoffed, referring to the code for Ni­ger­ian e-mail scams.

“The minister of finance job is one of the toughest in any country,”
said Lant Pritchett, a development economist at Harvard University.
“You’re spending all day telling people no.”

For many World Bank watchers, that ability to prioritize is a key
requisite to lead the organization. “As president, you’re constantly
trying to divvy up scarce funds and focus on the world’s most pressing
needs,” Easterly said. “You’re fundamentally making decisions that are
guided by economics.”

Such decisions can often be wrenching. In 2006, Okonjo-Iweala was
moved to a different post by Obasanjo, then left a year later to serve
as managing director of the World Bank. But Nigeria’s next president,
Goodluck Jonathan, asked her back in 2011 to resume her old Finance
Ministry job. She arrived as Nigeria was preparing to repeal its fuel
subsidies — a decision she supported — and bore the brunt of the anger
from the Occupy Nigeria protests that followed. In the end, the
government backed down and partly restored the subsidies.

An inside track

In many ways, Okonjo-Iweala isn’t looking to shake up the World Bank
the way she tried to shake up Nigeria. Her top priority, she has said,
is “job creation” — leveraging the bank’s loans and technical
expertise to help countries alleviate the sort of mass unemployment
that ignited the Arab Spring.

At a recent event in Washington, she held up a notebook and said she
had written down 11 things she thought needed to change at the
institution. Many of them were relatively small-bore — for instance,
that the World Bank needed to be quicker in offering technical
assistance. She noted that, as a Nigerian official, she had to turn to
the International Monetary Fund to connect the country with needed tax
experts, because the World Bank was too sluggish.

Yet her critics wonder why she didn’t address many of these problems
as managing director at the bank. “You had nearly four years to change
all this,” said one senior bank official, who wished to stay
anonymous. “What were you doing then?”

For others, Okonjo-Iweala’s familiarity with the labyrinthine bank and
its 10,000 employees is a strength. Jean-Louis Sarbib, a former bank
staffer who worked with Okonjo-Iweala, said that with the global
economy still in a fragile state, it would be an asset to have a
leader who doesn’t need to squander time getting oriented. Past World
Bank presidents, such as James Wolfensohn and (famously) Paul
Wolfowitz, often struggled to get much done in their first year or two
while trying to learn the ropes of the place.

And, Sarbib pointed out, Okonjo-Iweala has a relationship with the
board of directors, an important asset given that the board has
frequently clashed with past presidents. She also has a working
relationship with Christine Lagarde, the president of the IMF, from
their days negotiating Nigeria’s debt deal. (Lagarde was France’s
finance minister at the time.)

The key question, then, is whether that competence and familiarity is
more important than changing the World Bank’s direction. At the
moment, many people both inside and outside the organization agree
that it needs to shift focus. The bank’s long-standing focus on
development in the world’s least-developed countries is becoming
increasingly outmoded now that nearly two-thirds of the world’s
poorest reside in middle-income countries such as China and India.

“We spent a decade on human development, on gender, health, education,
and now we have all these middle-income countries that also need
modern infrastructure to advance their economies and continue to move
up,” said Paul Cadario, a longtime World Bank staffer. “Do we have the
credibility on that? And what are we going to do to engage on safety
nets, on impediments to doing business, on making these countries less
vulnerable to financial shocks, too?”

Part of the logic of Kim’s candidacy is that he is an outsider, a
pioneer of a new model of public health who helped push the World
Health Organization in a new direction. But he’s also, in that
respect, a bit of an unknown — Easterly, for one, worries that Kim
could be a “Sarah Palin figure,” out of his depth at the bank.

Okonjo-Iweala, by contrast, is the safer bet, but also less likely to
drastically reorient the institution. When asked recently, for
instance, if she would pay more attention to climate change and
rethink the bank’s controversial support for building coal-fired power
plants, she gave a judicious answer: “I think the World Bank should be
helping [countries] to find affordable alternatives,” she said. “But
where this is not possible, then using the best technology possible to
try and use this coal.”

In any case, Okonjo-Iweala’s views on where to take the bank may be
moot. When its board of executive directors makes its pick next week,
Kim is very likely to be its selection. After all, Washington has
gotten its way on this matter for 60 years. The board’s voting powers
are allocated according to financial support from wealthy donor
nations, and Japan and European countries appear ready to side with
the United States.

Which means that the real radicalism of Okonjo-Iweala’s candidacy may
be less about what she wants for the bank and more the fact that, for
the first time, she has made it possible to envision a non-American
leading the institution. Along with former Colombian finance minister
Jose Antonio Ocampo, Okonjo-Iweala has helped create the bank’s first-
ever competitive race for the presidency.

That’s no small matter in a world where China and India are wielding
significant economic clout and demanding reform of international
financial institutions. Okonjo-Iweala has warned that those rising
powers could lose interest in these long-standing institutions if they
don’t have a chance to be represented.

“You know, the bank has been around 60 years,” Okonjo-Iweala has said,
speaking of the process by which the president is chosen. “That’s
quite a bit of inertia. So you have to have the courage to say, look,
certain things that we’ve always done this way, they have to go.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/can-ngozi-okonjo-...