It’s Time to Go, Mr. Wolfowitz

We have ardently followed Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s embattled career at the World Bank. Although his appointment by US President George W. Bush provoked a comparison with the appointment of Robert McNamara by President Lyndon Johnson some years ago in many quarters, many of the Bank’s 7,000 employees in Washington, DC saw it differently from the very outset. One of them who I know disclosed to me during a conversation in the first few months of his presence at the Bank that some of her colleagues had indicated that they would leave specifically because of him. In fact, thereafter, she subsequently confirmed that some of those colleagues including her, did take leave of the Bank.

There is no kidding around the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz is not well like at the Bank by many of its employees in Washington, DC. They simply are averse to what can succinctly be called his ideologically-steeped politics. Mr. Wolfowitz is seen as the manifest presence of George Bush’s worldview at the Bank, and Bank employees don’t seem comfortable with the thought of their president using the powerful trappings of his office to implement that worldview in the name of the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz played directly into the hands of the employees’ aversion for him by his conduct as soon as he assumed his new job.

Ever since the saga over his role in the transfer of his girlfriend to a position in the US State Department with an unusual pay increase and future promotion broke out, Bank employees have been steadfast in their insistence that his continued presence as president would negatively impact the Bank’s mandate. Just this Wednesday, one of his two deputies, Mr. Graeme Wheeler, told him to his face to resign. There is no doubt at all that Mr. Wheeler speaks for majority of the senior managers and sundry Bank staff. Last week, Mr. Wolfowitz was even booed off the podium by 200 Bank employees when he tried to reason with them in the atrium.

The 24-member executive board is immersed in the bureaucratic wrangle over whether or not he should stay. What is currently underway now seems to be a test of will between that governing body and the Bush White House, which sustains its support for Mr. Wolfowitz. What remains clear here is that but for the big clout that the US wields in the board, Mr. Wolfowitz could have been a goner. In other words, notwithstanding his determination to retain his job, he doesn’t have a viable future at the Bank as president any more. It’s therefore time for him to resign and seek professional fulfillment elsewhere.