“At the World Bank Group, we preach principles of good governance, transparency, diversity, international competition and merit-based selection,” said the letter from the staff association, which represents more than 15,000 employees. “Unfortunately, none of these principles have applied to the appointment of past World Bank Group Presidents.” “Instead, we have accepted decades of backroom deals which, twelve times in a row, selected an American male,” the letter said. Following an unwritten rule, European governments choose the head of the International Monetary Fund while the United States names the president of the World Bank. The Bank is also facing competition from other actors in the development world, such as China. The annual internal employee surveys show the Bank is “experiencing a crisis of leadership,” the letter said.
The letter called for the selection process to consider men and women on the basis of clear criteria in a transparent manner. “The world has changed and we must change with it,” the letter said. “Unless we revisit the rules of the game, the World Bank Group faces the real possibility of becoming an anachronism on international stage.”
Staff at the World Bank delivered a broadside against its sitting president this week, saying the global lender faced a “crisis of leadership” and risked irrelevance on the world stage. The rebuke, made in an open letter from the Bank’s staff association, came as informal talks have reportedly begun on choosing the Bank’s next president. Jim Yong Kim, the current president, whose term ends in less than a year, has not officially declared whether he wishes to stay on. Since taking office in 2012, Kim has undertaken a cross-cutting structural reform which has left some staff members uneasy. Internal surveys have shown that large proportions of Bank staff feel distrustful of senior management
• Banks may write off bad loans this year
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was again compelled to intervene on the interbank foreign exchange (forex) market on Tuesday to shore up the naira and check its free fall.
The bank had flayed authorised forex dealers for abuse of its discount window, forcing it to read the riot act to offenders, warning that further abuse would foreclose future access to the opportunity.
The naira had hit an all-time low of N350 to $1. It, however, appreciated significantly to close at N310.50 after the apex bank’s intervention, with traders revealing that a total of $6.86 million was traded.
Reports indicate: “A single trade of $100,000 was carried out at 350 to the dollar” before the intervention.
CBN said in a circular to all authorised dealers that it was forced to intervene because of what it described as “the observed abuse of access to the Central Bank of Nigeria Standing Lending Facility by authorised dealers.”
The circular, which was posted on the CBN official website, with reference number: FMD/DIR/GEN/CIR/07/005, explained: “It became imperative that some measures be taken to redress the trend and redefine the mode of operation by authorised dealers at the window.”
The circular, signed by its Director, Financial Markets Department, Alvan Ikoku, thereby directed all authorised dealers for forex “to refrain from accessing the discount window of the CBN on the settlement date for government securities’ auction.”
It clarified further: “The securities referred to here are CBN bills, Nigerian Treasury Bills and Federal Government of Nigeria Bonds.”
SOURCE:GRACIOUSGIST/COM,Clara Nwachukwu and Chijioke Nelson
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