THE FALL of Paul Wolfowitz and the circumstance of his demise provides an opening for the reform in the system for selecting the president of the World Bank, as well as the head of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Unfortunately, as already signalled by the Bush administration, the Americans are unlikely to grasp the opportunity. So, as has been the case for the more than half a century of its existence, the next leader of the World Bank will be an American. Countries like Jamaica have no real say in the matter; but they should.

The IMF and the World Bank were financial institutions created at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the aftermath of World War 11. The world then was a different place with a few rich, stable nations and a majority of colonial territories.

The structure of the Bretton Woods institutions represented the realities of the time: their control was consistent with the existing global order, exemplified in a weighted voting system that keeps control primarily in the hands of a few rich, Western nations, especially the United States (U.S.), which had emerged from the war confirmed as the new global power.

So, at the World Bank today, seven industrial nations have 44 per cent of the voting power. These countries have less than 20 per cent of the world's population. But moresignificantly, the United States, as the world's most powerful economy, has approximately 17 per cent of the bank's voting rights, which effectively gives it veto power in an arrangement where it requires 85 per cent for decisions to carry.

Over the years, the Americans and the Europeans have worked out an arrangement for sharing power over the Bretton Woods institutions: the Americans get to appoint the president of the World Bank while the Europeans name the managing director of the IMF. It is in that circumstance that Wolfowitz was in 2005 appointed to head the bank, at the retirement of James Wolfensohn.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wolfowitz's appointment served to expose the dangers in a mechanism that is inherently undemocratic, lacks transparency and tests for merit. For it was always clear that he would bring substantial baggage to the job. After all, Wolfowitz is a noted neo-conservative, a proponent of the ideology of regime change and a key architect of America's unpopular war in Iraq.

In that respect, there might have been in the Wolfowitz appointment, echoes of Robert McNamara, who used his tenure at the World Bank to atone for his role taking the U.S. into Vietnam. But Wolfowitz's personality does not lend to the consensus-building required in the job. He established his own coterie, isolated professional staff and acted unilaterally. He was undone by arranging, in breach of the bank's ethical rules, a promotion and big pay raise for a girlfriend, ostensibly outside the World Bank, which weakened his own campaign against corruption.

What the Wolfowitz saga has clearly shown is that good governance is more than good intentions, but the result of specifics, including the process for selecting those who govern. That should be open and transparent, and in the context of the Bretton Woods institutions, not limited to talent from specific geographic regions and the decision of a handful of people who happen to be rich.