The Board of Peace is not the only problem at the World Bank

I thought that Mieko Nishimizu had retired the lifetime award for “highest ratio of vapid ambition to genuine accomplishment in an international organization” but she must accept second place (for now; this is a race in which the competition will always be fierce). Ajay Banga, who is, for the moment, still President of the World Bank, has seized the title.

Ajay Banga has achieved the following in 2026.

Continued to be humiliated by Scott Bessent into abandoning the Bank’s leadership on global heating and on women’s equality;

Done nothing in response to a ruinous critique of his portfolio (by the great Parminder Brar at mdbreform.com), except maintain as his principal deputies people (Anna Bjerde, Sweden; Paschal Donohoe, Ireland) with no analytical qualifications and no actual working experience of Bank operations in countries where the institution works.

Expanded the Bank Group’s guarantees with no visible regard to the development impact of previous guarantees;

Abandoned its flagship energy project in Nigeria1 while allowing a local businessman to dictate the content of a Bank report on that country;

Looked the other way as Bank staff let Senegal’s former President Macky Sall loot that country’s treasury and hand the bill to the Bank and the Fund (a scandal that will soon spread through all of francophone West Africa);

Created a dangerous, avoidable, conflict of interest between operations of the private sector window of the Bank (the International Finance Corporation, IFC) and those of the public sector windows (including the low-income facility, known as the International Development Association, IDA); and, most recently:

Allowed himself to be inveigled by Trump and a wicked despotate into “managing” the trust fund for the so-called “Board of Peace” 2that would supposedly finance a US$17 billion relief package for Gaza.

We read that the Financial Times (May 26, 2026), one of two respectable papers remaining in English, the others having ceded their jobs to the flacks of the plutocracy, now admits “Donald Trump’s Board of Peace fund is empty”. None of the US$17 billion projected to flow through the Bank’s trust fund has been committed and there appear to be no plans to make such commitments. There may be money for the Board of Peace through another channel but the public knows nothing of it and, as the FT reports, officials of the Board of Peace are not telling us.

The Board of Peace arrangement is the latest of Banga’s mistakes but it is not unique. His misdirection of the Bank has a pattern: he announces some new thing—derisking of private investment, electrification in Africa, digital agriculture, rebuilding Gaza, staff decentralization, integration of the parts of the World Bank Group into a whole, more efficient portfolio management—and when those things don’t give results, he moves onto something else.

Banga is the wrong person for the job. He hasn’t realized that the World Bank (and the other multilateral development banks) must be judged by their development impact not by the volume of loans or by the speed of project preparation or by the number of VIPs brought into advise him or by the number of important meetings he attends or by the billions of pixels of goofy selfies snapped by his team. He doesn’t see that talking about job creation—which is a good thing to talk about—is not the same thing as measuring the jobs created by Bank-supported operations. He doesn’t grasp that staff will lie to him about project impact in general and about job creation in particular. He doesn’t understand that responding quickly to emails or writing ditzy travelogues, as Mieko did, is makework. He does understand, it seems, that preventing those around him from speaking honestly is a way of managing the situation but this cannot endure.

Appointing the wrong CEO (again and again) is only a few degrees of the Bank’s slippage. The core of the problem is the US dominance and the craven weakness of the other Board members. Most Board chairs are happy to sit in Washington, enjoying their ersatz Ambassadorships, working at this and that, while emitting gaseous pronuncements on subjects they scarely comprehend. Changing the CEO, yet again, without a radical change in the Board and in the role of the US, will do little.