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Akinwumi Adesina,
minister of agriculture and rural development for Nigeria. Photo by: Eric Roset
/ Africa Progress Panel / CC BY
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Akinwumi Adesina has said he aims to increase private sector
lending to curb widening inequality on the continent. Nigeria is backing its
agriculture minister, Adesina, to head the bank, which lends to
African governments and companies working on infrastructure projects and other
programs.
Adesina has extensive
agricultural background, from serving as vice president of policy and
partnerships at the Alliance
for a Green Revolution in Africa to being at the driver’s seat of
Nigeria’s agricultural transformation over the past few years.
Devex/Bloomberg/GRAPHITTI NEWS report:
As Nigeria’s agriculture
and rural development minister, Adesina has been widely credited for bringing
an end to — or at least reducing the risk of — corruption in the fertilizer
industry by putting the private sector in charge of delivery. Nirsal,
the agribusiness facility he introduced in 2011, is often cited as instrumental
in getting banks to increase their agricultural lending.
The e-wallet system
Adesina rolled out in 2012 has meanwhile generated interest from within Africa
as well as from emerging donor countries, such as Brazil, China and India. The
system was designed to cut off the middleman and provide the latest agrimarket
information directly to farmers’ mobile phones, which also receive seed and
fertilizer vouchers.
The goal is to provide
mobile phones to 10 million farmers and, according to government data, more
than 14 million have been registered into the system to date. And despite
issues such as poor network coverage, low levels of awareness and insufficient
fertilizer supply in some areas, Adesina said in his Forbes’ 2013 African of
the Year acceptance speech that several governments have already expressed
interest in adopting this innovation in their own countries.
Another contender, Sakala
has said governments must raise more money domestically for infrastructure
projects to help spur economic growth.
South Africa is
supporting the candidacy of Thomas Sakala, a Zimbabwean national who has worked
at the AfDB for 31 years.
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Thomas Sakala, former
vice president of country and regional programs at the African Development
Bank. Photo by: Jean-Marc Ferré / United Nations Geneva / CC BY-NC-ND
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Having spent over three
decades at the African
Development Bank, Thomas Sakala is supposed to know better than most of his
competitors the bank’s history, its politics, its developed strengths and where
it is still struggling.
From being a loans
officer — his first job at the bank in 1983 — Sakala climbed the ranks and
served senior positions in different capacities. He sat as manager of the
bank’s human resource and education division, and served as resident
representative of its office in Nigeria. He also headed the team in charge of
implementing the bank’s reform agenda.
He also became involved
in the bank’s programming and budget, at one point served as acting vice
president of corporate services, before finally becoming vice president of
country and regional programs and policies, under which he coordinated the
bank’s programs across 54 African countries as well as those targeted at
regional economic groupings.
He stepped down as
country and regional programs vice president in August to pursue the topmost
position at the bank.
These different positions
have allowed Sakala to get insights on the expectations and constraints of the
bank’s donors, helped him understand better the bank’s resource allocation
system, and be in a position to, as his profile suggests, “contribute to [the
bank’s] overall strategic orientation.”
“I have developed a keen, critical and
unequalled ‘institutional memory’. Most crucially, I recognize that the bank is
a dynamic institution requiring change and adjustment; and I have the tool set
and broad perspectives on what has worked and what has not,” he said in his
vision for AfDB.
But while Sakala is
leveraging his experience to secure the AfDB presidency, some experts argue it
may actually hurt his chances, as some member countries might prefer to install
a new face with a fresh set of ideas for the bank.
The AfDB’s governors, who
include finance ministers and central bank leaders from across the continent,
will choose Kaberuka’s successor on May 28 during the bank’s annual meetings in
Ivory Coast’s commercial capital of Abidjan.
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