ABSTRACT
‘Sweet Jaysus’, O’Donnell whispered, his oath for major occasions that took him back to his Irish roots. Namland was one of the Bank’s model countries – the only one, in fact, in sub-Saharan Africa. Julian Cray rattled off all the right figures, the successes, the reasons why Namland was teacher’s pet as far as the Bank was concerned. Some of Cray’s other numbers O’Donnell found less welcome – the increases in urban unemployment and the amount by which Namland’s foreign debt had increased since the country had entered its period of ‘successful’ adjustment. Namland had always been poor but it used to rank forty-second on United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund's score sheets, which meant that at least it had a lower child mortality rate than forty-one even more awful countries to raise kids in.
