Let me state at the outset that I have nothing to say about the brouhaha over Paul Wolfowitz's alleged improprieties at the helm of the World Bank -- or lack thereof -- or about his competence as manager of this, that, or any other thing.  But I think this, from the opinion page of today's Wall Street Journal, is important:

At a press conference during this month's World Bank-IMF meetings in Washington, four of the more progressive African finance ministers were asked about the Wolfowitz flap. Here's how Antoinette Sayeh, Liberia's finance minister, responded:

"I would say that Wolfowitz's performance over the last several years and his leadership on African issues should certainly feature prominently in the discussions. . . . In the Liberian case and the case of many forgotten post-conflict fragile countries, he has been a visionary. He has been absolutely supportive, responsive, there for us. . . . We think that he has done a lot to bring Africa in general . . . into the limelight and has certainly championed our cause over the last two years of his leadership, and we look forward to it continuing."

In the same pages not long ago, William Easterly had this to say:

African governments are not the only ones that are bad, but they have ranked low for decades on most international comparisons of corruption, state failure, red tape, lawlessness and dictatorship. Nor is recognizing such bad government "racist" -- this would be an insult to the many Africans who risk their lives to protest their own bad governments. Instead, corrupt and mismanaged governments on the continent reflect the unhappy way in which colonizers artificially created most nations, often combining antagonistic ethnicities. Anyway, the results of statist economics by bad states was a near-zero rise in GDP per capita for Ghana, and the same for the average African nation, over the last 50 years.

Let's be clear -- Easterly is no fan of Paul Wolfowitz.  But at least part of his criticism is based on the belief that reforms at the World Bank are not going far enough...

But beyond Uzbekistan and a few other laudable aid cutoffs, the Wolfowitz program was compromised by selective prosecution. By the bank's own measures, 54 other countries are about as corrupt as Uzbekistan, or worse. Should the bank cut off all 54? (I say, why not?) Wolfowitz was not willing to go that far, alas, which left everyone confused about what his criteria really were.

... and that the mission is not sufficiently single-minded:

Wolfowitz also continued a disastrous trend begun by [his predecessor, James D.] Wolfensohn, whose answer to every bank failure to meet a goal was to add three new goals. The pair have supplemented the bank's original objective -- promoting economic growth -- with everything from securing children's rights to promoting world peace. In so doing, they've sacrificed clarity of direction for ludicrously infeasible but PR-friendly slogans like "empowering the poor" and "attaining the Millennium Development Goals" (which cover every last ounce of human suffering).

Fair enough.  But whatever the outcome of this most recent bureaucratic flare-up, it would be good to keep our eyes on the prize.  Again from today's WSJ editorial:

... At the same April 14 press conference, Zambian Finance Minister N'Gandu Peter Magande endorsed the anticorruption agenda:

"We should keep positive that whatever happens to the president, if, for example, he was to leave, I think whoever comes, we insist that he continues where we have been left, in particular on this issue of anticorruption. That is a cancer that has seen quite a lot of our countries lose development and has seen the poverty continuing in our countries. And therefore . . . we want to live up to what [Wolfowitz] made us believe" that "it is important for ourselves to keep to those high standards."

Yes, indeed.

Addendum: In my opinion, the development debate is represented by the ongoing conversation between Professor Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.  Courtesy of the former, you can follow that debate here.