HOURS before the official announcement yesterday of United States (U.S.) nominee, Jim Yong Kim, as the new president of the World Bank in Washington DC, Nigeria's Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy and Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who was the key contender in the race, said the appointment was not being decided on merit and that the American would win.America's might and not merit, she said, would be the deciding factor.Her prediction eventually came to pass with the selection of the American, Kim, by the board of the bank yesterday.Okonjo-Iweala, however claimed triumphantly yesterday that her bid had helped bring change to the process.Kim will succeed Robert Zoellick, who is stepping down at the end of his term in June.The U.S. faced a challenge for the first time in 66 years from two strong developing countries' candidates.The other candidate, former Colombian Finance Minister Jose Antonio Ocampo, dropped out on Friday complaining that the selection process was all political.'It will never ever be the same again,' Okonjo-Iweala said.'So, we have won a big victory. Who gets to run the World Bank ' we have shown we can contest this thing and Africa can produce people capable of running the entire architecture.'Under a tacit agreement since the Bretton Woods institutions were founded nearly 70 years ago, the U.S. has always put an American at the helm of the World Bank and Europe has picked a European to lead the International Monetary Fund.Okonjo-Iweala, a respected Harvard-educated economist, was widely seen as a strong candidate to challenge the status quo.Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, who had earlier in the day spoken at the 2012 Budget briefing in Abuja, assured Nigerians that she would be around to implement the Appropriation.On her predictable defeat in the race for the World Bank job, she had said:'It is voting with political weight and shares and therefore the U.S. will get it.'She also spoke of how she had been under pressure from some powerful forces in the bank to withdraw from the race to allow for a consensus candidate for the job.She said before the final decision yesterday: ' The African Business team that invited me said I should stay. So, I have to stay till the end. Some of the World Bank's rule, unless they have officially announced that their rules required that I have to drop, but if they don't announce it, I don't know how I can step down. They are saying the rules demand that there should be a consensus candidate; that the person must emerge by consensus. And if they must select the person by consensus, it means the last person must leave. But I could not do that until they announce that publicly.'They did not publish the rules for every body to know.''Let me tell you something: the reason why I am so buoyant and we are so buoyant, like Mr. President said and Mr. Quattara also said, is that we have already won because Africa has presentedsomeone, not just there to take aid but someone who understands architecture of the World Bank,'she concluded.Reacting to Okonjo-Iweala's loss, former Adviser to a Nigerian Executive Director at African Development Bank, Chief Lawson Omokhodion, said it was totally inconceivable that she could be successfully enthroned as the World Bank President.According to him, the World Bank presidency does not come based on primordial sentiment, but through exercise of a voting power.He said: 'Nigeria, ab initio, never had the platform on which its citizens would have attained that position. It was a waste of resources and people's expectations to have, in fact, believed that she would be the president.'No Nigerian has ever been able to win ADB Presidency, let alone aspiring to World Bank Presidency. Even, there is no Nigerian who is an Executive Director in the World Bank. It was a fiasco from the beginning. The best Nigeria has had is the position of an alternate director.'Omokodion stated further that the World Bank presidency cannot go to a country which is not a good example to the world, adding that 'those countries said to have proposed Okonjo-Iweala are the same countries that spearheaded the perennial opposition to the Nigerian candidacy to the ADB presidency.'On the selection of Korean-American physician Kim, the bank in a statement said: 'The Executive Directors selected Dr. Jim Yong Kim as President for a five-year term beginning on July 1, 2012. The President is Chair of the Boards of Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA). The President is also ex-officio Chair of the Boards of Directors of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the Administrative Council of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).'We, the Executive Directors, wish to express our deep appreciation to all the nominees, Jim Yong Kim, Jos Antonio Ocampo and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Their candidacies enriched the discussion of the role of the President and of the World Bank Group's future direction. The final nominees received support from different member-countries, which reflected the high calibre of the candidates. We all look forward to working with Dr. Kim when he assumes his responsibilities.'Dr. Kim is currently President of Dartmouth College. A U.S. national, Dr. Kim is a co-founder of Partners in Health (PIH) and a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation (WHO). Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, Dr. Kim held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and director of the Franois Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health.Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. Dr. Kim graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982. He earned a medical doctorate from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993.He is married to Dr. Younsook Lim, a pediatrician. The couple has two young sons.
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