[Q]Africa's poor bring out the dove in hawkish Wolfowitz
By Bronwen Maddox
PAUL WOLFOWITZ has got the Africa bug. Returning from a flying trip to Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Rwanda and South Africa, the new President of the World Bank says: “I am more convinced than ever that it is appropriate that Africa is our first priority.”
Tony Blair’s decision to put Africa on the agenda at next month’s G8 summit in Gleneagles has been “a gift from heaven”. Wolfowitz, who is generous with compliments for Britain and its Commission for Africa, sounds closer to Blair or Bob Geldof than he does to the Bush Administration, where he was until this year such a central figure.
“I would like to see increased levels of US aid by whatever means,” he says. He adds that he would like the US to move towards the European target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product on aid, although he concedes the figure “can seem a little abstract to the people I talk to”.
This kind of talk hardly fits Wolfowitz’s image as the hawk, the architect of the Iraq war, and the neo-conservative who put the fire in the Bush Administration’s mission to export democracy around the world. But it does reflect the “softer” side of some Washington neo-conservatives, many of whom are committed to an energetic notion of development, inspired by the idealism of the 1960s and 1970s when they first became politically active.
Speaking yesterday at a featureless Heathrow hotel, a pitstop between the dusty African villages he had just seen and the gleaming glass of the bank’s headquarters back in Washington, he made light of the opposition to his appointment from continental Europe.
“Maybe the next World Bank president doesn’t have to be from America,” he agreed mildly, offering in a sentence to overturn the tradition which came under such attack when President Bush picked him for the post. But he also noted that “the board approved my nomination unanimously, and I take that as a sign that in development, you can get together to agree these things”.
Wolfowitz, who said his trip had left him optimistic, was brimming over with stories of Africans he had just met. In a village in Nigeria, he was “pulling out women at random from the crowd” to talk to, and handed out 21 cheques, in the name of transparency, demonstrating that the bank’s money would not get stolen on the way.
In Burkino Faso, in a “dirt dry area”, he met a boy whose father couldn’t pay for the final year of school. “I’m going to see if we can pay for it,” he said. In Rwanda, he met a flower farmer who said: “I came here to grow beautiful flowers on the ashes of genocide”. And in South Africa, in a home for abandoned children, many infected with HIV, he found “just beautiful kids, upbeat, well-disciplined . . . it breaks your heart to realise how many don’t have that opportunity.”
It is heady stuff. His commitment is moving and convincing, even if his litany of over-resonant encounters began to sound like the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, that sentimental collage of images of war and hope.
Wolfowitz was blunt about the bank’s past mistakes — not tough enough on corruption — and firm that it should give money only to well-governed countries. He will not be shy, he said, of taking the bank back into the kind of infrastructure projects — dams, power plants and roads — which brought it past criticism.
“The bank tended to get out of infrastructure in the 1990s,” he said. “The development community endorsed a lot of white elephants in the 1970s which were a magnet for corruption but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need infrastructure.”
Hanging over this optimism about his new role, however, must be the shadow of Iraq. “I’m not in this job to debate the Iraq war,” he said. “Maybe some time I’ll write a history about it.”
It is no surprise that he might find it more exhilarating to hand out cheques than to spiral down in a Black Hawk helicopter into a capital which loathes the US presence. But he will be judged not just by how he handles the bank but also by the fate of the war he would prefer to leave behind.
[/Q]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1661306,00.html
By Bronwen Maddox
PAUL WOLFOWITZ has got the Africa bug. Returning from a flying trip to Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Rwanda and South Africa, the new President of the World Bank says: “I am more convinced than ever that it is appropriate that Africa is our first priority.”
Tony Blair’s decision to put Africa on the agenda at next month’s G8 summit in Gleneagles has been “a gift from heaven”. Wolfowitz, who is generous with compliments for Britain and its Commission for Africa, sounds closer to Blair or Bob Geldof than he does to the Bush Administration, where he was until this year such a central figure.
“I would like to see increased levels of US aid by whatever means,” he says. He adds that he would like the US to move towards the European target of spending 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product on aid, although he concedes the figure “can seem a little abstract to the people I talk to”.
This kind of talk hardly fits Wolfowitz’s image as the hawk, the architect of the Iraq war, and the neo-conservative who put the fire in the Bush Administration’s mission to export democracy around the world. But it does reflect the “softer” side of some Washington neo-conservatives, many of whom are committed to an energetic notion of development, inspired by the idealism of the 1960s and 1970s when they first became politically active.
Speaking yesterday at a featureless Heathrow hotel, a pitstop between the dusty African villages he had just seen and the gleaming glass of the bank’s headquarters back in Washington, he made light of the opposition to his appointment from continental Europe.
“Maybe the next World Bank president doesn’t have to be from America,” he agreed mildly, offering in a sentence to overturn the tradition which came under such attack when President Bush picked him for the post. But he also noted that “the board approved my nomination unanimously, and I take that as a sign that in development, you can get together to agree these things”.
Wolfowitz, who said his trip had left him optimistic, was brimming over with stories of Africans he had just met. In a village in Nigeria, he was “pulling out women at random from the crowd” to talk to, and handed out 21 cheques, in the name of transparency, demonstrating that the bank’s money would not get stolen on the way.
In Burkino Faso, in a “dirt dry area”, he met a boy whose father couldn’t pay for the final year of school. “I’m going to see if we can pay for it,” he said. In Rwanda, he met a flower farmer who said: “I came here to grow beautiful flowers on the ashes of genocide”. And in South Africa, in a home for abandoned children, many infected with HIV, he found “just beautiful kids, upbeat, well-disciplined . . . it breaks your heart to realise how many don’t have that opportunity.”
It is heady stuff. His commitment is moving and convincing, even if his litany of over-resonant encounters began to sound like the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, that sentimental collage of images of war and hope.
Wolfowitz was blunt about the bank’s past mistakes — not tough enough on corruption — and firm that it should give money only to well-governed countries. He will not be shy, he said, of taking the bank back into the kind of infrastructure projects — dams, power plants and roads — which brought it past criticism.
“The bank tended to get out of infrastructure in the 1990s,” he said. “The development community endorsed a lot of white elephants in the 1970s which were a magnet for corruption but that doesn’t mean that you don’t need infrastructure.”
Hanging over this optimism about his new role, however, must be the shadow of Iraq. “I’m not in this job to debate the Iraq war,” he said. “Maybe some time I’ll write a history about it.”
It is no surprise that he might find it more exhilarating to hand out cheques than to spiral down in a Black Hawk helicopter into a capital which loathes the US presence. But he will be judged not just by how he handles the bank but also by the fate of the war he would prefer to leave behind.
[/Q]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1661306,00.html
