Thursday, February 15, 2007

World Bank can't stand transparency?

According to this Fox report,the World Bank which is on a global crusade to instill “transparency” in governments that receive its poverty aid is unable to accept the same standard of transparency for itself.

Paul Wolfowit is the president of the World Bank who 19 months ago, was U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary and one of the trusted member of the Bush team that raced for war against Saddam Hussein.

The perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the US vice president's former chief of staff has shown the world how selective leaks are given out to the media to further a cause. Leaking information to the media is nothing new in Washington.

Confidential boardroom information that Fox has obtained illustrates the explosive level of animosity currently focused on Wolfowitz and his management by the World Bank board.

At the heart of the world’s largest and most influential anti-poverty agency, which spends about $20 billion a year on aid, lies a deep-rooted problem of transparency -- a concept that Wolfowitz is aggressively trying to sell to the World Bank’s borrowers, who are mainly the world’s developing nations.

It appears that for most of its history, World Bank officials ignored complaints about corruption. The bank managers worried that confronting those involved in graft would be an improper intrusion into domestic af fairs of sovereign states.

Since the World Bank's challenge is to alleviate poverty, it must confront corruption head on, for corruption is a cancer and it must be rooted out. Only then can the full benefit of the bank's aid pass on to the most needy and empower the poor and help them to come out of the poverty trap.

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