The Whistleblowers' Tale

The real disgrace at the World Bank.

BY BRET STEPHENS

In the summer of 1997, two senior World Bank officials published an academic article under the cheerful title, "Africa on the Move: Attracting Private Capital to a Changing Continent." The authors, Jean-Louis Sarbib of France and Callisto Madavo of Zimbabwe, were responsible for the bank's work in Africa, and they took an optimistic view. "A new spirit of social and economic progress has energized much of the region," they wrote, "and gradually the rest of the world is beginning to take notice."

Among the bank's own contributions to this African Renaissance, as it was then being billed, was something called the Niger Health Sector Development Program. It had been approved by.....