Maravi

African Organizations Reject Ministers' Praise for Wolfowitz

by 50 Years Is Enough
Apr 16, 2007

African civil society leaders reacted with outrage to assertions by African finance ministers that World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz has been "good for Africa."

"Don't try to make Africa his saving grace," said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, Executive Director of Nairobi-based Daughters of Mumbi Global Resource Center, from Nairobi, Kenya. "The impact of the World Bank's policy impositions of the last 20 years still devastates us every day. There are still kids out of school, hospitals without medicines, thousands of children dying before the age of five, and millions without safe water because of the Bank's policies. Paul Wolfowitz has done nothing to change that; he is no true friend of Africa. African politicians do African peoples no favors by making excuses for corruption and for the corrupt; Wolfowitz must resign."

At a news conference on Saturday, the finance ministers of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Mauritius spoke favorably of Wolfowitz's impact in Africa, in an apparent coordinated attempt by the Bank president's backers to foster an image of an official making a difference in the world's poorest continent, even as he faces many obstacles. Those obstacles now include charges that he improperly gave his girlfriend, a Bank staffer, exorbitant pay raises.

Emira Woods, a Liberian based in Washington, DC with the Institute for Policy Studies, said, "The Africa Finance Ministers called Paul Wolfowitz a 'visionary.'" Let's remember that this man's vision included the invasion of Iraq, and the prediction that US soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. Africans are not neutral on the question of the U.S. war in Iraq, just as they do not condone corruption at high levels.”

Finally, Nita Evele, a Washington-based activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, said, "Corruption and the World Bank, corruption and Paul Wolfowitz: these are not new, and are not limited to his girlfriend. Congolese in the U.S. protested outside the Bank on Saturday – a protest that called for Wolfowitz's resignation. But our initial and overriding purpose was to call attention to the way the World Bank, under Wolfowitz's direction, has facilitated the turning over of our country's vast mineral resources to multinational corporations for a song. If depriving the Congolese people, some of the most impoverished and abused by decades of violent history, of control over the resources isn't corruption, what is?"

Contact: Njoki Njehu (Kenya): +254-723-229-426
Emily Shwartz Greco: (202) 297-5412
Nita Evele: (202) 558-0220

Labels: PAUL WOLFOWITZ, World Bank

posted by MrK @ 8:41 PM