In Chad, a death during a fight against graft
David Bryan Jones arrived in the central African country of Chad in early 1997 and never got out alive.
The British native was the World Bank's top man in Chad, an oil-producing nation of some 10 million that has long been trapped by poverty, rebellion, corruption, and repressive dictators.
What happened to Jones, then 54, chilled many staffers at the World Bank's headquarters in Washington. It is a story that has never before been told.
Just three months after arriving in N'Djamena, the capital, Jones was dead, the victim, Chadian authorities said, of a hit-and-run driver.
But some bank staffers were not so sure. Here is why: Jones was raising concerns about corruption in a bank-funded project in Chad in the days before his death.
In March, in fact, Jones sent a blunt message back to headquarters in Washington. It said, according to a bank document: "If anyone has to personally deliver a nasty message'' about the project, he wrote, "it will be me.'' And: "The big open question is whether [the project] really should be salvaged.''
On March 30, soon after sending the e-mail, Jones was killed. Now, no one knows if he was, in fact, murdered because of his concerns about the bank-funded project.
But even today, in the hallways of the bank's plush headquarters, the case of David Jones remains vivid to some staffers.
"There was pretty widespread leakage [a bank euphemism for theft] in the Chad project,'' says one staffer familiar with the events. "Obviously he was on to something, but to establish a link between his E-mail and that truck running over him is difficult.''
His death so upset some staffers that they refused to travel to Chad and other French-speaking African countries in which AGETIP projects were operating. (AGETIP is an acronym for Agency for the Execution of Works in the Public Interest to Combat Unemployment.)
"This incident and other alleged threats and deaths allegedly associated with AGETIP projects,'' said one bank memo, "caused [Internal Audit Division] personnel to refuse to go to the countries.''
Jones was a close friend of Jean-Louis Sarbib, a bank vice president, who said in an interview that he didn't think Jones was murdered but acknowledged that at the time some bank personnel feared "that maybe there was something wrong.''
So, Sarbib says, he hopped on a plane soon after Jones's death and traveled to N'Djamena, where he conferred with local bank employees and Chadian authorities. He could never, he says, get to the bottom of what had actually happened. "The Chadian authorities ... told us the reason for which this truck ran away,'' he says, "was it had to do with possibly some contraband.''
As it turned out, Jones's concerns about the AGETIP project in Chad were more than justified. In January 1998, the bank dispatched an audit team to Chad to review the $17 million program. Bank auditors uncovered bid rigging and "tainted'' procurements, among other problems. In some cases, money was paid, and services were not rendered, according to a bank report obtained by U.S. News. In 1999, the Chadian government, after resisting, agreed to repay the bank $635,000. The blowup didn't cost Chad much: The bank continued to provide other funds to the government.
The $600 million AGETIP program was created to develop jobs in French-speaking Africa. AGETIPs are private entities that manage projects–public works, health, and agriculture, for instance–for African governments. The bank provides funds to the governments, which pass them along to the AGETIPs.
Because of similar corruption problems in other African countries during the 1990s, Paul Wolfowitz, the bank president, has ordered a sweeping review of what went wrong in the AGETIP program.
Meanwhile, Chad, considered one of the most corrupt countries in the world, continues to be a headache for the World Bank. Last January, the bank announced that it was putting a hold on all new grants and loans to Chad and suspending $124 million that had been scheduled for long-term disbursement under existing projects.
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