L

ast month, we had a very distinguished visitor, the illustrious World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, who has managed to bring more change to the bank than his immediate predecessors.

As is wont, he called upon the President, Vice President and minister of finance. He even managed to have a meeting with Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, while inspecting a number of World Bank-funded projects, including the Yogya Reconstruction Fund.

Acknowledging the criticism leveled against the bank by President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo in Bandung earlier in April, he reassured the President that his concerns were being taken on board.

To demonstrate that there were no hurt feelings, he extended a credit line, or loan, amounting to US$12 billion, over a four year period. The WB is a bank after all, and to stay in business, it has to continue making loans.

The emphasis remained on infrastructure although he did mention human capital. This is what you would have expected from any World Bank president.

But Professor Kim is not just any World Bank president '€” he has managed to refocus the bank by force of character. This was very much in evidence when he addressed university students at the University of Indonesia'€™s School of Medicine Senate on the Salemba Campus, a seminar for which Rector Anis and country director Chavez deserve kudos.

Being a doctor himself, it came as no surprise that although the theme was '€œPromoting Opportunity and Prosperity in East Asia'€; he underlined that he was offering cooperation in tackling two of the major health problems facing Indonesia '€” stunting and maternal mortality.

Although neither the dean of the School of Medicine nor their senior professors were in sight, he pointed out that the World Bank under his leadership was very keen to share its knowledge and expertise, as failure to seriously address these health issues would impinge upon Indonesia'€™s productivity and competitiveness.

As a former president of a major university, he imprinted the importance of quality education upon the students. He spun the South Korean narrative, highlighting the strategic role played by the '€œfire in the bellies'€ of Korean students, which propelled them to pursue higher education and create a productive middle class.

I think most senior Indonesians remember that we had comparable per capita incomes in the mid-1960s, and although both governments were authoritarian, South Korea managed to inculcate a very strong sense of nationhood, wherein citizens out-vied each other in contributing to the nation'€™s quest to achieve Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or developed-country status.

We have no means of ascertaining whether Kim managed to convey any spiritual message to his hosts. Namely, that the very essence of leadership is the humility to accept feedback.

Nor whether in his discussions, he was able to convince them that the two major challenges facing civilization were climate change and inequality.

He has enlisted religious leaders to join him in the crusade, an idea which the Partnership for Government Reform (Kemitraan) in Indonesia had put into practice in 2004, when it partnered with the two largest Muslim organizations in the world, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, to fight corruption. Lastly, we do not know whether he found the opportunity to advise his hosts to encourage their senior-most staff to attend something akin to the Day of Mindfulness Meditation, led by Thich Nhat Hanh, a widely acclaimed Zen Buddhist monk, teacher and peace activist, attended by more than 300 WB staff a few years ago.

I am sure that such a day of reflection might help our senior officials reexamine their lives to ascertain whether they are indeed serving the people.

What was missing? A mea culpa! It is regrettable that his good friend and managing director of the bank, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, failed to convince Kim to apologize to the Indonesian people at the very onset of his first visit.

Someone should have pointed out to him that the infrastructure deficit, stunting and maternal mortality are in large part due to the mismanagement of the Asian crisis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), aided and abetted by the World Bank Jakarta office.

Of course, rapacious officials were to blame, but the IMF insistence on fire sales did not help. This resulted in bailing out the conglomerates responsible for the crisis in the first place, placing their odious debt upon the shoulders of current and future Indonesian generations.

The IMF managing director admitted as much years ago and had duly apologized. What'€™s past is prologue: Most of the '€œzombie conglomerates'€ and cronies who have been able to recapture the state are now dominating the national political scene, garnering rents and exacerbating inequality.

Would an admission running like '€œI am sorry if any of our policies and actions inflicted unnecessary pain upon the Indonesian people'€ have been all that difficult?

Not from a moral figure like Kim, particularly since it was around that time he himself was active in the '€œ50 years is enough'€ campaign against the WB.

It would have endeared him not only to the Indonesian people, but to all Asians who suffered unnecessarily.

What could Kim do to help build a much more equitable civilization? He holds a PhD in anthropology, and is thus in a better position to recognize who we are, how we came to be this way and where we may go in the future.

The more reason he should abandon the '€œtrickle-down'€ paradigm that the World Bank is unwittingly reinforcing by predicating poverty alleviation upon robust growth, even when it is fully aware that since 2008 for every dollar of wealth created, 93 cents accrue to the top one percent.

 His economists must certainly be familiar with Piketty'€™s extensive study into wealth creation, and his proposal for a global system of progressive wealth taxes to help reduce inequality and avoid the vast majority of wealth coming under the control of a tiny minority.

Kim himself no doubt knows that excessive inequality adversely affects people'€™s quality of life, leading to a higher incidence of poverty, impeding progress in health and education and contributing to crime.

Although the challenges posed by the 1 percent and their proxies may be daunting, Kim could use the remainder of his tenure to advance humankind by embracing the '€œgrowth through equity'€ paradigm, wherein the locus of the accumulation of capital is in the household of the poor and marginalized.

Continue to walk along the path, Kim; you may be the key that opens the door.
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The writer was executive director of the Partnership for Government Reform (Kemitraan) in Indonesia, 2004-2006.