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06/18/2005:

"Wolfowitz, Ending African Tour, Calls for Changes"

PRETORIA, South Africa, June 18 - The World Bank needs to streamline its bureaucracy and refocus its lending on rebuilding decaying infrastructures in poor nations, the bank's new president, Paul A. Wolfowitz, said Saturday at the conclusion of his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa.

At a news conference with South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, Mr. Wolfowitz said African leaders' commitments to address corruption and misfeasance had opened new opportunities to combat poverty in this, the world's poorest region. But he acknowledged that future lending would have to be better managed.

"There is increasing recognition that the reason they have these debts is that a lot of governments in the past didn't spend that money well - and that's an understatement," he said. "You know what I'm talking about, corruption."

He praised Mr. Mbeki, who recently dismissed his deputy president after a trial linked him to a bribery scheme, for leading efforts for better government in the region.

In his first trip abroad as president of the bank Mr. Wolfowitz spent six days in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa, much of it visiting rural areas to see first-hand the region's needs.

Earlier, Mr. Wolfowitz condemned Zimbabwe's uprooting of hundreds of thousands of slum dwellers, calling it inhuman and saying it must damage the country's development prospects. "It's a tragedy," he said.
Full: nytimes.com

What insufferable hypocrisy.