By G Mohan Gopal
Published:
FINANCIAL TIMES
April 30 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 30 2007 03:00
From Dr G. Mohan Gopal.
Sir,
Paul Wolfowitz’s actions in the Defense Department and now at the World Bank have come in for copious criticism across the world. As a former chief counsel in the World Bank legal department, however, I was quite amused to see in your newspaper (April 23) a letter signed by a group of former managers of the World Bank expressing concern about poor governance at the Bank and calling on Mr Wolfowitz to resign.
Many of the senior managers listed as signatories of the letter can take far more credit than Mr Wolfowitz for the decline of the World Bank.
The signatories include some of the architects of the infamous 1987 reorganisation of the World Bank that independent observers consider the worst institutional disaster that the Bank has faced – the “tipping point” in the decline of the Bank – leading to a gutting of its technical expertise and the ascendancy in management of a group of young professionals (to which most of the signatories belong) who were Bank “lifers” with little or no experience of the “real” world outside the Bank.
Others among the signatories were appointed to key positions by Mr Wolfowitz’s predecessor, Jim Wolfensohn, because they were not the most renowned for their technical or managerial competence. With Mr Wolfensohn, they converted the Bank into a “presidential” institution. Under the governance of many of these signatories, senior, independent experts were replaced by young and inexperienced recruits who were given jobs and responsibilities far beyond their knowledge and capacity – a change keenly felt by many borrowers who can no longer reliably look to Bank staff for world class, independent technical advice.
Therefore let him among these signatories cast the first stone who was not party to the UN-style culture that was built up since 1987, especially in Jim Wolfensohn’s World Bank. If these signatories had practised the good governance that they preach in their letter, the Bank would not have come to the sorry pass that it finds itself in today – but then they would not have been able today to sign off as former senior managers.
G. Mohan Gopal,
Director,
National Judicial Academy,
Bhopal, India
(World Bank lawyer
between 1986 and 2004)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Prof. G. Mohan Gopal 