According to Dr. Akinwuni Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, corruption is not an African problem.
This was said by Adesina in a statement issued Saturday in Abuja and made available to the News Agency of Nigeria.
He asserts that what matters is to keep enhancing accountability, transparency, and the usage of public funds.
“The global financial crisis that brought the world to an end in 2008, was not in Africa,” the statement continues. Wall Street does not exist. That collapse was caused by fraud, corruption, and greed.
“You have people cooking the books that are in the financial industry in Europe, not in Africa. Corruption is not an African issue.
“The issue is that is not to say that there’s none. What you have to do is to continue to improve transparency, accountability and the use of public resources.”
According to Adesina, he discovered during his first visit to Eritrea that the country has a zero per cent corruption record.
“During my first visit to Eritrea, I was talking to UN Development Programme staff. You know what they told me? That, in Eritrea, corruption is zero per cent.
“Why do we not talk about that? That’s the kind of thing that we want to do. For us as a development bank, we take good governance very seriously.
“As far as I am concerned, people’s resources do not belong in other people’s pockets. Governments must be accountable to their people,” he said.
According to the AfDB boss, there has to be transparency on how resources are acquired and used. That’s why we have a governance programme.
He said: “whWhenou get money from us, we also support you technically. You are accounting for those resources.
“I don’t want to minimise that Africa has a significant amount of illicit capital flows; it does anything between 80 billion and 100 billion dollars a year.
“But guess what? Those that are doing that are the multinational companies. And so what we have got to do is bring a searchlight to that.”
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Adesina lamented that Africa consistently occupies the lowest position in the global value chain when asked how it could move up the chain.
He contends that exporting raw commodities is the quickest route to poverty, whereas international value chains are the fastest route to wealth.
He claimed that you could do this by giving more value to whatever you have, including your oil, gas, minerals, metals, and food, We must provide value.
“The issue is, we have to invest right; we have to make sure the governance environment is right; we have to make sure the incentives are right.
“Africa must take a position that it is no longer going to be at the bottom but at the top,” he said.
Commenting on the Bank’s support for food security in Africa, the AfDB boss said, “I don’t think that you can have development with pride unless you can feed yourself.
According to Adesina, the 81 shareholders of the AfDB provided it with an increase in the bank’s capital at the end of 2019, from 93 billion to 208 billion dollars.
According to the head of the AfDB, this was the largest capital increase in the institution’s history.
However, he claimed that the rise had allowed the bank to create a 10-billion-dollar emergency support facility for COVID crisis response in Africa.
In order to address the global geopolitical problem that is causing a food crisis in Africa, according to Adesina, the bank opened a 1.5 billion dollar emergency food production plant.
“Africa needs to have a lot more resources for financing climate, but what is out there is not enough.
“We have on the table right now the special drawing rights of the IMF. But when they were issued, 650 billion dollars were issued, Africa got 33 billion dollars.”
“It’s 4.5 per cent, it’s not good. You have small countries in Europe that got more and that is not fair and not inclusive.”
He claims that African heads of state are requesting that 100 billion dollars be redistributed from those that have received it but are not using it or in need of it.
“We might think of maybe just adjusting it a little bit. And calling it Supporting Development Revitalisation. That’s also SDRs,” he said.
NAN
