Nigeria’s finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is among the candidates being proposed to take over the presidency of the World Bank, with the incumbent Robert Zoellick, having served notice that he would step down in June.
Ngozi was a former managing director of the bank until late last year when he resigned to become Nigeria’s finance minister, for the second time in less than a decade. She is the favorite of Nancy Birdsall, head of the Center for Global Development, who stressed that the selection process “needs to be competitive” and truly open to any candidate.
Birdsall has also proposed Nandan Nilekania, the Indian co-founder of INFOSYS.
It is crucial that “whoever ends up in the job has the legitimacy that a person that is truly competent would ensure,” she said in a phone interview with the AFP.
It is not clear yet whether Ngozi would dump Nigeria for the World bank job.
But the race is much hotter with Americans with renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, who led the UN committee on the Millennium development goals, throwing his hat in the ring Friday in a Washington Post op-ed piece, saying the World Bank needs an expert like himself rather than another politician or Wall Street banker.
Sachs’s declaration came amid signs the United States is eyeing others for the high-profile job.
Joke! The authors of this story do not seem to know how the international system work. No disrepect to the credendtials and capability of Mrs. Oknonjo- Iweala, she can not be the next WB President, and she knows this. The post is 'zoned' to the US, just as that of the IMF is 'zoned' to Europe or France to be precise. We can only start talking about the possibility of extremely well qualified potential candidates from other parts of the world, Africa and Asia in this case, when the rules of the game have been changed.
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