101318
Japan’s Role in Africa, the Parliamentary Breakfast Meeting, Tokyo,
Japan

Remarks by President Wolfowitz
October 11, 2005

[Japanese]

Mr. Komura, Chairman, Japanese Parliamentarians’ Partnership League: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you very much for gathering from early in the morning. The proceedings have been going on very smoothly,
and I am very delighted for this. We are indeed privileged to have Mr. Wolfowitz, the 10th president of the World
Bank, with us to give us a lecture. We have recently completed the Lower House election. The importance of the
World Development Program has not been the focus of attention during the campaign unfortunately because, I
believe, we were not doing our own job fully to be accountable for our programs and activities, and I am reflecting on
this. Mr. Wolfowitz has been going around the world to explain to us the World Bank activities, and I am looking
forward to him enlightening us on the activities of the World Bank. Let us welcome him.

Mr. Wakabayashi: Thank you very much. Then immediately may I ask Mr. Wolfowitz to give his statements? As for
his curriculum vitae (CV), I believe this is included in your package. From June of this year he has become the
president of the World Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz, perhaps 10 minutes or 15 minutes, please.

Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, President, World Bank: Thank you. Is this working? Hello? Thank you. Konnichiwa. Ohayoo
gozaimasu. Perhaps since it is early in the morning, to help wake people up, let me start with a joke —but remember
this is not a true story; it is a joke. It seems that there was an American business consultant who was invited to come
and give a speech in Japan., and to prepare himself thoroughly he consulted a consultant. This consultant explained
to him that in Japan it is very important to present yourself as very humble. So he began his speech with a long
apology, explaining that he was not really an expert on the subject; that he would undoubtedly make many mistakes;
and he wanted to apologize in advance for any mistakes that he made. At this point his Japanese audience broke out
into uproarious laughter, and the poor man did not know what to do. But he continued on through his speech, and he
finally got to the end. And he got off the stage, and the manager of the company that invited him came running up.
And he said, “I have to apologize, sir. We were preparing our staff for your speech, and we explained to them that in
America people always begin their speeches with a joke. So whatever he says, laugh.�

It was a story that was told to me many years ago as an illustration that sometimes it is difficult to communicate
across different cultures. But the truth is I have been coming to Japan—I figured out yesterday—for 24 years now.
And I found it very fruitful communication. Sometimes we have to work through translators, because we Americans
are not good at Japanese, myself included. But I have always found it a very, very fruitful cooperation and exchange
of views, and I look forward to the same thing this morning. In fact, I first came here in 1981 when I was the head of
the planning staff at the US State Department, and we had two days of talks with our colleagues in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. It was there, I think, that I was educated for the first time in the Japanese concept of comprehensive
security, and came to appreciate how important in Japanese thinking is to the whole idea of development
assistance—that Japan can contribute to the security of the world not through arms, but through helping poor nations
develop. That was 1981, and we have seen some remarkable progress in the world in that time, particularly in East
Asia. And Japan has contributed to that progress in two very important ways.

First, your example has been inspirational. It may now be such old news that you have forgotten. But you were the
first country outside of Europe and the United States to demonstrate that successful development is possible. And
you did it with your own self-reliance; you did it with the reliance on market mechanisms. You set an example that
inspired Hong Kong and Taiwan and Singapore and South Korea. Those little tigers, as they were called, in turn
inspired the big tiger, which is mainland China. And, as they say, the rest is history. But it is history that is still going
on, and Japan is still contributing now—not only by example, but also by the magnitude of your very substantial
contributions to development assistance. Not only, I might add, in terms of dollars, but it is appropriate to note this
morning, sometimes with lives lost. One of your aid workers in Islamabad and his two-year-old son were just killed in
this earthquake, and I am very familiar with the two Japanese aid workers who were brutally murdered in Iraq a little
over a year ago—there to help poor people in Iraq enjoy a better life. So Japan’s contribution is both as an inspiration
and as a substantial provider of aid.
As the second largest shareholder in the World Bank, Japan is a key member of my institution. Our relationship with
Japan is second to none, and we value it most highly. Today the world is challenged to help the poor countries
achieve the Millennium Development Goals. And I know that Japan and the World Bank have a common view and a
common set of priorities in that endeavor. In doing so I think it is very important that we recognize that we need to
focus, as our first priority, on Africa. That does not mean our only priority, by any means. There are still very large
challenges in your own neighborhood in East Asia and not far away in South Asia, and for that matter in the western
hemisphere and South America. But in sub-Saharan Africa, we have 600 million people who have not been making
progress in the last 20 years. In fact, there is more poverty in sub-Saharan Africa today than there was 10 years ago.
Some people say that is because it is a hopeless continent—that it is because there is no way to make progress. And
I am here to tell you that I think that is not true. I think there are real changes taking place in Africa. Not everywhere,
but in quite a few countries now, we are encountering governments that realize that self-reliance and market
mechanisms—those things that contributed so much to Japan’s success—are key to their own.

I just met two weeks ago with the new finance minister of a small, terribly poor West African country called Malawi.
He said to me, “We have to stop blaming everything on our colonial past. Our colonial past was bad , and it is a
challenge. But we will only make progress when we take responsibility for ourselves.� I think that is the attitude that is
starting to be felt in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The issue of corruption, which unquestionably has been one of
the factors that has held back progress in southern Africa, is being tackled squarely by quite a few African
governments. In fact, in Malawi itself, the finance minister told me that three senior officials, including the former
finance minister, were in jail on corruption charges. In Nigeria, not only has President Obasanjo been going after
corruption by senior officials, but he has also committed his government to transparency in the use of the very large
oil revenues that that country has, and that it did not use so well in the past. Nigeria seems, as President Obasanjo
said to me, to be a country on the move.

I visited Rwanda, which I think most of you know—I knew—was a country that had suffered a terrible tragedy 11
years ago in which almost a million Rwandans were murdered in one of the worst genocides since World War II. And
I did not expect to see much in the way that was hopeful when I went to Rwanda, but I was pleasantly surprised. That
new government has made impressive strides in reconciling with its enemies, with the people who were responsible
for those crimes. Perhaps more importantly, that new government is making impressive strides in the area of
development—so much so that Rwanda has achieved better than 6% real growth for the last seven years. Let me
repeat: 6% real growth for seven years by a small country in Africa. I think that is news. I think that is something that
we did not hear 10 years ago, and countries like that, I believe, deserve all the help that the international community
can provide them. Rwanda is landlocked. I visited a very impressive flower farm that had been established by a
woman, a Rwandan who was a business woman in the United States. She was successful in the United States. She
did not have to go back to Rwanda. She went back to start this flower farm. I asked her, “Why did you do this?� She
said, “I came to grow beautiful flowers on the ashes of genocide.� It is an amazing idea. And she has, with this farm,
provided excellent jobs for some 200 rural women. Her problem is not a lack of initiative or a lack of enterprise;
obviously she has it in an enormous quantity. Her problem is not a lack of intelligent, energetic Africans who can work
on her farm. Her problem is that it is a long way from Rwanda to her markets in Europe. Her other problem is that
electricity is very unreliable in Rwanda. So she loses 5% of her flowers, roughly —that is a lot—to electricity
shortages.

Those are problems that money can fix. Money cannot fix bad government; money cannot fix people who do not take
responsibility. But when Africans are improving their governance, when Africans are taking responsibility, money can
help to fix the electricity, to build better roads, to build better airports. That is the reason why at the World Bank we
have begun to increase our investments in infrastructure. Over the last 10 years, World Bank’s support for
infrastructure projects declined dramatically. I think one of the reasons for that is that we made some mistakes in the
past. We built some big dams that were not productive; we built some roads that were not well-maintained; we paid
for some big, expensive projects that became targets for corruption. But just because you made mistakes in the past
is not a reason to give up on doing something. Mark Twain said, “Once a cat sits on a hot stove, the cat will never sit
on a cold stove again.� We should not be stupid like the cat. Just because we made some mistakes, we should learn
from the mistakes and do better in the future. I think this is a place where Japan has an enormous amount to
contribute. Obviously Japanese have enormous experience and skills to offer in the whole area of infrastructure. But
also you have the very valuable experience of how to build infrastructure projects in ways that are not harmful to the
environment. I know from experience that in Japan, in fact, you spend a great deal on infrastructure projects to make
them environmentally-friendly, and that is probably more expensive than poor African countries can afford. But
nevertheless I think that the experience of how to balance the need for infrastructure with the need for preserving the
environment is just one of many areas where Japanese experience can be extremely valuable.

Let me just conclude on a broader note. This has been called “The Year of Development.� I think it has been a very
successful year so far. The summit in Scotland at Gleneagles, where Prime Minister Koizumi was a very important
participant, and where I had the pleasure of attending some of the meetings, laid out an ambitious agenda of doubling
aid over the next 10 years, including doubling aid to Africa, and canceling the debts of some of the poorest countries,
most of them in Africa. I would like to emphasize too that in most cases the governments that we are canceling the
debts for are not the governments that incurred the debts. This is not a matter of rewarding people who made bad
use of the money. I think it is a matter of freeing new governments to take on new challenges, new responsibilities.
But there is a third piece that is critically important that all of the developed countries, actually all of the world (the
developing countries as well), need to step up to: and that is the challenge of trade, because aid by itself is not the
answer. The answer comes in jobs that make people self-sufficient, that ceases/ends the long-term dependence on
aid. That requires access to markets—markets in the developed countries, but also markets in their own countries in
the developing world.

There is a big challenge coming up in Hong Kong with the Hong Kong round of the Doha development trade round. I
know all of these trade issues are difficult. In fact, when I was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia for four
years, I spent many, many hours with Japanese officials on trade issues, on citrus, on beef. I am familiar with how
difficult those issues are. They are difficult in my own country; they are difficult in Japan; they are difficult in Europe.
For that matter, they are difficult in India and Brazil. But they are critically important. There are enormous gains to be
made by everybody, including the developed countries, if there is more market access. I know that at the end of the
day some of those difficult decisions will come to you as parliamentarians, and I would just like to urge you to support
a constructive outcome of the Hong Kong trade round. I think it is not an overstatement to say that the future of many
poor people in Africa and other parts of the world depends on it.

Thank you for coming this morning. Thank you for your participation in this parliamentary group of the World Bank. I
think the relationship between Japan and the World Bank is one of the most critical ones that we have, if not the most
critical, and I appreciate your support for it. Thank you.