Africa should sue the World Bank!

A big thing happened in international development last week. Strange that there is very little talk about it.

The Big news is this. The World Bank suspended publication of its now very infamous Doing Business Report. There will be no report in 2021.I hope that the suspension will not be lifted. I do recall once describing that report at a meeting as “Ideology brazenly parading as objective economic analysis promoting beggar thy neighbor policies”. Of course, that was not comfortable to many, especially to some of my fellow Africans who probably were afraid that I may be jeopardizing their continued professional and “per diem” viability.

The Doing Business Report was a very corrupt instrument for policy making. Do away with regulations. Abolish or do not institute social protection measures. Let the oil companies pollute your environment and your waterways. Reduce taxes even as you are begging the whole world for loans that will increase your indebtedness to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and leading industrial economies. And the World Bank will reward you by ranking you higher on its Doing Business Index.

You need regulations because many regulations doing a lot of good. You need higher taxes to raise resources for development. You need to give workers decent wages and protect from shocks. African economists, analysts and policy makers should have called this report what is - useless- or at worst rubbish (although there was some murmuring about it).

But we fell over ourselves promoting DBR and adopted policies that made our conditions worse than they otherwise would have been. The masters 1818 H Street, Washington DC must be pleased otherwise that new loan application will not be approved. Some African governments even went as far as setting up special Doing Business Offices or Presidential Advisory Committees solely dedicated to carrying out the “recommendations” in the Doing Business Report. Each year government bureaucrats and leaders in the private sector wait anxiously to see if there has been an improvement in the country’s ranking in the Doing Business Index. Imagine the cost of all the wrong policies African countries adopted based on the recommendations of this report? A movement up the ladder of the index was celebrated as a big thing. Never mind the adverse consequences of the policies.

I think it is time sue the World Bank for the harm, some irreversible, caused by the Doing Business Report. And for the decades of development lost due in part to the Structural Adjustment Programme. These “experts” descend on our poor countries to carry out policy experiments without any empirical support. And when the policies fail, they blame us!! “Those Africans, so abominably corrupt, nothing will ever work” there is often their excuse.

Until African economists rise up and begin to challenge some of the voodoo economics of some of these international organizations, until we learn that our poverty does not make us zombies and clones of their thinking, our continent and our countries will not know genuine progress. World Bank "experts"- private sector experts who cannot manage a small business when they retire but spend their retirement either living on their pension or chasing one consultancy after another; governance experts who can't effectively run a government department when appointed to such post by their home governments. These "experts" are using our countries, our continent to run policy experiments. It is time for that to stop. It is past time for African economists to assert themselves. It is past time for another Adebayo Adedeji.

I hope that soon than later, another very unhelpful World Bank programme of work, the work on governance, will be suspended and tanked forever, and that we will return to old fashioned, better focused, public administration. Governance was an intellectual contrivance, a fudge of sorts that the World Bank used to get into areas where its mandate probably did not allow it to work on. Governance, the euphemism for public administration, has long outlived its usefulness. It has not resulted in significant improvements in the way we administer our countries. All that it has done has been to present "corruption" as an all-encompassing defense for the bad policies that the World Bank hoists on countries. Every policy failure in Africa is blamed on "weak institutions, and poor governance." It is time to resurrect public administration and bury governance for good.

It is past time for Africa to sue the World Bank. Suing the World Bank is not as unthinkable as it once. In a landmark decision in 2019, the US. Supreme Court in a landmark 7-1 decision determined, in the Jam v. IFC decision, that the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, cannot claim absolute immunity from prosecution. International organizations like the IFC and the World Bank can now be sued in US courts. Until and unless African countries begin to sue the World Bank, their policy trascality, and horrible instruments such as the Doing Business Report, will continue to be used to shape policies that mess up our lives and circumscribe the future of African societies.