We, and others, had suggested that it would be prudent for President Bush to use the fall of Paul Wolfowitz from the presidency of the World Bank to put in train the much-needed reform of the Bretton Woods institutions.

The President would have started by eschewing the old and worn practice of leaving the leadership of the World Bank to the United States while allowing the Europeans to have the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Unfortunately, Mr Bush has chosen to follow what American presidents have done for 60 years and nominated the head of the bank.

Admittedly, though, Mr Bush could have done much worse than fingering Robert Zoellick, who is currently a managing director of the investment bank Goldman Sachs and chairman of its international advisory division. But it is Zoellick's other antecedents which make him a potentially more appealing candidate than his predecessor, Wolfowitz.

Until recently, Zoellick was a deputy U.S. Secretary of State, and as one of Condoleezza Rice's deputies sought to put pressure on Sudan to end the genocide in Darfur and to expand the United Nations' peacekeeping role in the area. There was a hint of the humanitarian in Zoellick's efforts.

But it is his previous job in the Bush administration that, we think, provides better credentials for a stint at the World Bank: that of U.S. Special Trade Representative, between 2001 and 2005. In that role he led America's trade negotiations and helped launch the Doha Round of global trade negotiations.

We have not always liked America's stance at the World Trade Organisation or its approaches to global negotiations. Indeed, we often disagreed. Importantly, however, the Doha Round underlined the unfulfilled development agenda of previous trade rounds, recognising many of the issues critical to taking small, poor and weak countries like our own out of the cycle of poverty. It is here that Zoellick's past and future at the World Bank intersect.

It is the bank's mission to invest in the physical and social infrastructure of poor countries to help provide catalysts for development. It is a process that Zoellick should understand and appreciate - hopefully without the hubris and arrogance of Wolfowitz.

If, indeed, Zoellick is minded to lead the World Bank on its declared mission, he will have to move swiftly, and with deftness, to repair the frayed relationships at the bank, which go beyond Wolfowitz's corrupt organising of a transfer and big pay hike for his girlfriend. There is, too, Wolfowitz's erosion of trust by the bank's professional staff by surrounding himself with a coterie of ideologues from his hawkish reincarnation at the U.S. Defence Department. He will also have the job of repairing relationships between the bank and its clients, as well as the bank and its donor members.

Zoellick will find Wolfowitz's strategy of walking heavily, talking loudly and wielding a truncheon of little value. In the process, we hope that Zoellick will find it within himself to advise the Americans that he should be the last of the World Bank's presidents whose appointment should be in the gift of the U.S. President.

He must tell President Bush, and whoever else, that the leadership of the World Bank and the IMF should be open to competitive meritocracy.

The opinions on this page, except forthe above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.