SA minister to seek IMF, World Bank reforms

The South African finance minister, Trevor Manuel, who chairs the boards of governors of the IMF and the World Bank, has said he will seek to accelerate reforms of both lending agencies at their annual meetings in Prague, in the Czech Republic later this month. In an interview with the ‘Financial Times’, Manuel said he wanted to address the issue of voting rights for poor nations, as well as the way both agencies implemented lending programmes in the developing world.

His remarks coincided with a World Bank report this week saying that half the world’s population - many of them in Africa - live on less than US $2 a day and that growth in global wealth had left most regions behind. In its latest 332-page World Development Report, sub-titled ‘Attacking Poverty’, the bank admitted that past approaches to poverty reduction were not working.

He did not, however, expect “instant results” in a change to a voting system in which wealthy nations have overwhelming influence. While the heads of both agencies were keen on reform, their staff members remained “recalcitrant”, he said. IMF staff, for example, “would instruct a country to replace its legislation overnight”, he said. “If people behave like that, they do not understand what processes in a democracy are all about.”