CONTENTIOUS MOVE
Kim expected to win second 5-year term
Jim Yong Kim is nominated for a second fiveyear term as president of the World Bank.
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama on Thursday nominated Jim Yong Kim for a second five-year term as president of the World Bank despite persistent complaints among employees about his leadership at a time when the mission of the global development institution is in question.
The bank’s board announced two days earlier that it was beginning to consider who would be its next president, inviting nominations as it did for the first time in 2012.
While many World Bank watchers expect Kim to be reappointed, given the seven-decade tradition of choosing an American picked by the United States, the bank’s largest contributor, they say he will have to work to solidify support.
His nomination was made shortly after midnight in a statement from Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.
Because Thursday was the first day for nominations, the administration was signaling its strong support for Kim by making its announcement just minutes into the day, according to a Treasury official.
And with the deadline for nominations just weeks away, Sept 14, the quick action was also intended to discourage wouldbe rivals.
“President Kim has used his first term to focus the World Bank on effectively addressing today’s most pressing global development challenges in innovative ways, from ending extreme poverty and tackling inequality, to combating climate change,” Lew said.
He also lauded Kim, whose term ends next June, for spearheading the bank’s response to the Ebola epidemic and the refugee crisis in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and for the “needed reforms at the World Bank.”
Those changes at the 189-nation organisation, including a prolonged, disruptive reorganisation and spending and staff cuts in the roughly 15,000-member workforce, are at the heart of the complaints from current and former employees. So, too, is a tradition of having Americans head the bank at its headquarters in Washington.
A letter this month to the bank board from the staff association, which urged consideration of other nominees, reflected both concerns — with Kim and the Americans-only tradition.
“We have accepted decades of backroom deals which, 12 times in a row, selected an American male,” it said. “This must change.”
As for Kim, the staff letter noted that annual employee surveys “for two years running, made it painfully clear that the World Bank is experiencing a crisis of leadership.”
It also pointed up a core complaint: that Kim was prone to making substantial changes with minimal consultation.
“Only 1 in 3 understand where the senior management team is leading us,” it added. “Even fewer believe that our senior management creates a culture of openness and trust.”
The tradition of Americans leading the bank dates to its creation at the end of World War II; it has been honoured in tandem with naming a European to lead the other major multinational financial institution, the International Monetary Fund.
For all of Kim’s critics on his staff, he has acquired allies among the member nations whose board representatives will vote. Several nations officially announced support Thursday, including the Netherlands, Pakistan and South Korea.
Kim was born in South Korea but moved to the United States as a child and became a citizen.
Scott Morris, a former Treasury official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, which works to alleviate poverty and inequality, said that support for Kim among emerging nations that include China, Brazil and India should show that his nomination “is not just the Americans jamming someone through.”
“I think he’s worked very hard during his first term to cultivate his relationships, particularly with the large emerging market countries,” he said.
Inside the bank, that is not the case. In a reorganisation that has gone on for years, Kim has shifted the bank from a country-by-country focus on economic development to one that emphasizes issues transcending borders, like health policies, climate change and refugee response. Morale has suffered, employees complain of Kim’s lack of communication and some have left.
“The emphasis on pandemic preparedness, on climate change, on refugee work — these are new emphases for the institution,” said Ian Solomon, who was executive director on the bank’s board for the United States from 2010 to 2013, and as such nominated Kim four years ago.
He called that vision “a necessary one and an urgent one,” at a time when world poverty is down, client nations can get cheap credit on their own or — as China does — finance their own development projects.
But Kim’s “execution has been challenged,” Solomon said. At the same time he has directed “a very ambitious internal reorganisation process which has gone on for a long time. And I think there is a lot of fatigue internally.”
Kim, who was travelling in Europe and Africa this week, said in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine: “In order to do a real change, you have to put jobs at risk. And completely understandably, people hate that.”