Who told you life in the “curse” lane was easy

Sir, yes Chad could not resist messing around with the mechanism of the transparency initiative for managing their oil income, and yes the World Bank could not just let them do so. But why should anyone believe that this first experiment needed to work in order to be useful. The fact that FT dedicates a full page about oil income being deviated from its originally intent of use, is already much more than what is normally written about all those other millions of oil income spillages that happens in the rest of the world. The important part is now to find a way forward, perhaps through some open-minded arbitration, instead of feeding the difficulties to satisfy the gluttony of all the salivating “we told you so”.

Sent to FT on January 23, 2006