POPE Francis has remained silent several months after a letter was sent to him providing compelling evidence of entrenched racism at the World Bank and the systemic exclusion of Africa as a continent and Africans as human beings from participation in international forums even in areas that determine their destiny.
In 2013, Elaine Colville, a British national and former World Bank staff wrote a revealing article titled “US and EU ignore plight of blacks at World Bank.” The article lamented that with European and North American countries “controlling the overwhelming majority of the voting rights of the World Bank, there is very little African governments can do to protect the rights of their citizens in the World Bank, even if minded to do so.”
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In 2015, Reverend Jesse Jackson, America’s iconic civil rights leader, took the matter several notches higher and published an open letter to Pope Francis “on behalf of those whose human dignity has been breached and whose cries for justice have been ignored.”
The letter that was widely published and formally submitted to the Pope through the Archbishop of Chicago provided compelling evidence of the systemic exclusion of Africa as a continent and Africans as human beings from participation in international forums even in areas that determine their destiny. The letter used the World Bank as a manifestation of the race-based international world order.
The Reverend revered the Pope: “Your Holiness, speaking of the ills of economic and social exclusions you stated that ‘exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes – they are no longer even a part of it.