Adesina, AfDB and the African development challenge

In a matter of weeks, the recently elected helmsman for the continent’s prime developmental agency, the African Development Bank, AFDB, would be taking up his post.


Across Africa and the world, the jury out there is that Akinwunmi Adesina, the pick for the position of President of the pan-Africanist agency, has performed creditably well in his immediate past posting as Minister of Agriculture. They are therefore pleased that he is getting the job.


Indeed, when and wherever dispassionate performance reviews on the outgoing Jonathan administration ministers have been done, Adesina routinely scores above a B. Some punditocrats have even gone on to suggest that if only the outgoing President was insistent enough to have had as much as five Adesinas in his team, his story would invariably have been different now. H would have very easily been returned for a second term in office. But that is, as they say, medicine after death.


But the Adesina story did not start with his captainship of Nigeria’s ministry of agriculture. For those who have cared to carry out the expository background checks, this is a well-grounded international public servant in every sense of the word. His salutary performance at Nigeria’s agricultural ministry adds to his billing no doubt but it is also to be noted that this is one bright wit that has shone and excelled in his service to the African continent at different levels.


With all of this, Adesina surely comes prepared as the man to take on the gargantuan challenge of the hour and do the job of literally fixing the development crises of the African continent; identifying the long-standing specific and general challenges and working with other critical stakeholders in their resolution.


And there is indeed a sense in which the success of the AFDB is indeed Africa’s success. For one, about none of the fifty something states that today dot the African landscape, by themselves or even together, have presently demonstrated a solid capacity to drive growth on the continent in such a way as to ensure the gradual erosion of the trend where the continent is widely perceived as being the least developed in the world. Evidence of this for example would be seen in the facts that Africa contributes less than two percent of the global world trade and industrial productivity tally; is the biggest net receiver of foreign aid and has no permanent member on the Security Council. Meanwhile, the continent where human life almost incontrovertibly began, contributes well over a quarter of the total 193-seat membership at the United Nations!


One core reason for these continuing lapses is the failure to seriously find and drive a solid socio-economic development paradigm for the continent. This was the reason why the global development community pushed for, and encouraged the transformation in 2001 of the politically-leaning supra-national umbrella body, the Organisation of African Unity, OAU, into the relatively more pragmatically defined African Union, AU. But the AU was supposed to be more than a definition. Like some of its contemporaries the world over, it was expected to come to the table with a slew of active and regularly functioning support institutions that were staffed by officers whose ultimate pull was not going to be the political leaders that chose them, but rather the technocratic institutional framework within which they operated. At the apex of these institutions were platforms like the continent’s standing army, its parliament and development bank. There were also the New Partnership for African Development, NEPAD and the African (Leaders) Peer Review Mechanism, APRM. Critically evaluated then, it will soon emerge that at the heart of the continuing under-performance of the AU and the continent therefore is the fact that these, and other associated agencies have yet to grow and bloom.


In a precise sense, the AFDB must as a matter of necessity, rise up to be counted. One of the realities of the global environment today is that even when the world has assuredly come to be a global village, for many of its peoples, the familiar and the proximate still take pre-eminence over the distant and exotic when it comes to core details of trade and interaction. Equally, there are issues of infrastructure, logistics and politics that continue to impede global trade relations amongst nations and peoples. This is what accounts for the continuing expansion of intra-European, intra-Asian and intra-North American trade today. It is practically, yet, a world of regions, thus there is no alternative to the deepening of intra-African economic activity today and this is where a well-led and strategically focused AFDB comes in.