By Femi Akinola and George George Idowu
Dr. Akinwumi Adesina (CON) is the President, Africa Development Bank (AfDB). Since he assumed the position of Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development in 2011, he has exhibited passion about the agriculture sector. Last week, he was in Nigeria to receive the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo Leadership Prize. He granted an interview and explains measures taken to revitalise the sector across Africa Continent. Excerpts………..
QUE: How do you feel on the occasion of your award as a recipient of the Obafemi Awolowo Leadership Prize? What does this award mean to you?
ANS: I must say the award and also all the great things that the selection committee had said about me tremendously humble me. Of course, it’s humbling to have to be in that category but this means a lot to me. I’ve by God’s grace won a lot of global awards but this is the most personal for me.
QUE: lt has been almost 10 years now with you at the helm of one of Africa’s biggest multilateral institutions. How were you tested and how did you overcome in this almost 10 years journey?
ANS: When I was elected President of the African Development Bank, I became the first Nigerian in the history of the bank since 1964. So, I’m actually always very much aware that I’m not my own person but representing a whole continent. I also represent the confidence of 208 million people from my country that actually supported me to be there. I asked myself the question what exactly am I going to do and I told myself that there’s nothing more important for me than to be given the responsibility and the resources and the confidence of our shareholders to go and transform the lives of the continent of my birth.
It’s not a job as far as I’m concerned. It’s a mission and a responsibility that I have to this continent to do. So, I started off by actually laying out a clear vision of exactly how I want to see Africa different. One, I don’t accept poverty as normal. I think we have to end poverty in Africa. I listed five key things we’re going to do, which was to light up, and power Africa. Give Africa 100% access to electricity, feed Africa, you know I believe that if you cannot feed yourself you cannot develop with pride and therefore you have to feed your people because nutritious people are productive people.
The third is to industrialize Africa. I don’t accept that Africa has to be at the bottom of the value chain in anything. We have natural advantage, so how do you turn that into real assets for ourselves competitively and globally. hat’s very important but also to integrate Africa we’ve got 54 countries and we’ve got a population of 1.4 billion people.
So, we must be able therefore to industrialize and not get stock at the bottom of value chains and use that market size to grow ourselves. The fifth one is to improve the quality of life of the people of Africa and that is, we have to improve the skills and create education opportunity for young people in particular. I try to make sure financial assistance work for young people and particularly women because I’m a very Pro women person all through my career. I planned for availability of water, as we know the importance of water and sanitation. But, l also makes sure that people have top quality health care services. Those are the things that I set out to do and it’s a bit funny in the beginning.
The very powerful thing with my team and the board of directors there was an external evaluation. Those fives points were well assessed by the United Nations Development Program. They said if Africa achieved those high fives Africa would have achieved 90% of the Sustainable Development Goals globally. We’re relentless in making sure that we push for this.
ln fact, we just developed a new 10year strategy for the bank and we’re trying to think of many things that we could do. We went back to the countries and guess what they told us? They said, just continue doing the high fives because they’re having impacts on us in our countries. In the last almost nine years that I’ve been president of the bank, those high fives have impacted on the lives of 400 million people. So, so as a leader, I think those are the excitement.
There are also challenges that you have to think about in trying to do things. That one of course is, you can have a great idea big ambition but they say money answers all things. So, if you don’t have the money to do it, the idea will just die. So, the first thing that I had to do was to seek the support of our shareholders. We have great shareholders. We have 81 shareholders of the bank, 54 of them are from Africa, 27 of them are from outside of Africa.
To increase the capital of the bank and it was not a walk in the park because no president of the bank ever since 1964 has try to do anything like that in their first term. But I knew that if we didn’t have the resources we couldn’t really transform Africa faster. At the end of the day, the shareholders agreed and they increased the capital of the bank $28 billion to $93 billion.
QUE: There was a time you were the minister of agriculture in Nigeria and from a leadership perspective how does that compare to leadership of a multilateral institution?
ANS: Well, I think that being a minister prepared me for the global assignment that I have today. Some of the things that I did as minister are exactly what I’m replicating at bigger scale for the continent. When I was a minister I was relentless. I was very sharply focused I felt that my responsibility was not a fly the flag of Nigeria but to make sure that the results are impactful. I had a fantastic team when I was minister of Agriculture. We work very closely with farmers. I’m a result driven person. I think leadership must be all about accountability you don’t have the luxury of duration but have have the responsibility of execution and delivery and impact at scale. That was what we did but now being head of African Development Bank Africa’s Premier financial institution and by the way the only triple A financial institution rated by Global Credit Agencies in Africa, that means I’ve got to work with 54 African countries I have to work with 27 non -African countries.
QUE: When you look at finance interventions especially around food security and look at climate change are those interventions working in your view including the ones that the AfDB is undertaking?
ANS: Absolutely I think they are working. Though there’s still quite some ways to go. When I was agriculture minister here, what I pushed for which was very successful was that agriculture is not a way of life; agriculture is a business you got 70% of the population living in the rural areas. So, if you’re ever going to change the lives and trajectories of the people of Africa, selves their kids good housing health and everything else you got to make agriculture a very wealthy sector. That way they can get jobs they can do many things and that’s what I did as Minister of Agriculture and it worked.
But when I got to the African Development Bank, the first thing I had to let Central Bank Governors and Ministers of Finance understand is that you know it’s something where you got inflation and of course we all know that in Microeconomics it’s pretty straightforward in terms of tightening money supply you raise interest rate and make people save more money and all that. But the fact is that in many African countries, what is happening in majority of these countries is this, if you look at their consumer price index, it used to be around 65% to 70% or 75% that is the price of food. So, if I am trying to manage it from just monetary policy side, it can’t succeed. Therefore, one have to have a structural approach to that and make sure one can drive the price of food down. That’s why at the African Development Bank, when I became President, I put top priority on food and Agriculture and we invested $25 billion into agriculture for about 10 year period.
Let me tell you some of the things that I really work with as regards to that. First is in agriculture, if you can have high performing technologies to raise the yields of farmers so that they can produce more and make more money and lower the cost of production. So I set up something with my approval of our Board with what is called Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation. I’m not going to go into all the details but basically what it does is about taking High performing Technologies and putting it in the hands of farmers not 100 millions and millions of farmers because for me I always tell my staff I don’t do Mickey Mouse stuff. You know, if you’re going to solve a problem solve it at scale of tens and hundreds. We are not talking about smallholder farmers or small medium scale farmers but largely 80% of them are smallholder farmers you know. What we did was, I’ll give you an example. ln the last five (5) years that platform has delivered High yielding Technologies for 13 million farmers across many African countries. I give another example.
In Ethiopia, we supported them to have access to heat tolerant wheat varieties you know wheat is a tempered crop and but in a context of climate change you are able to get technologies that can grow in a tropical environment very well. I talk to the Prime Minister and we encouraged him. So in 2018 they started with 5,000 hectares you know how much year of those varieties 2.1 million hectares. Ethiopia became self-sufficient in wheat in three (3) years. This year, Ethiopia became a net exporter of Wheat and so I am convinced that since Africa has 65% of all the Arable land left uncultivated in the world that’s got to be the source of wealth for us.
Look at oil, it is important, gas is important don’t get me wrong. Nobody drinks oil and nobody smokes gas but everybody eats food all the time around the world and so that’s why at the bank we went further. I was actually quite scared when the war in Ukraine started with Russia because it just actually was quite eye opening because I didn’t even realize that Africa was depending on Russia for most of the wheat and most of the maize. So, the prices just went up globally. Price indices for food went up globally. I said to myself No, this cannot continue to happen. I remember I was asked to give a testimony in front of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and I said, I don’t believe that we can solve this problem. They were asking how it could be solved. The problem can’t be solved where Africa continue going with bows in hand and begging for food. The way to solve it is to put seed in those bows for Africa to plant those seeds and produce by them because there’s no development without being able to feed yourself.
What the Board of our bank did was, I went to them with my staff and asked for u a $1.5 billion emergency facility food production facility to help Africa towards producing massive amount of food such as wheat, rice and also maize. Today, the bank is supporting over 20 million farmers in more than 34 countries that are producing now 38 million metric tons of food and why is that important the total amount of food that we were going to lose from Ukraine and Russia was 30 million metric tons so we’re going to produce eight (8) million metric tons more than that.
Now with that confidence and seeing how the country’s reacted I felt encouraged to now go to our leaders and say let’s do more and so I got together with President Macky Sali of Senegal who was then the Chairman of the African Union Commission (African Union) and said Mr. President, let’s go all the way because short term is structural long term is what’s most important so we decided to have what’s called the Feed Africa Summit which we held last year. It was mind blow blowing.
We had 34 heads of state and government that show up physically. Former President Muhammad Buhari was there at the time. We had the President of Ireland with the first lady. They were around for four days of the meeting. Here are the things that really excited me about it. This was not a summit where heads of government read speeches. In fact I said we are not going to have speeches but speak from your heart our word needs to change and the responsibility and the leadership that our heads of state have to taken and they were amazing. We organized them into investment boardrooms we put investor, we got private sector we put multilateral financial institutions everybody into a room and say what is the plan for your country to be food self-sufficient in three (3) years. There must be sovereignty in food production. Our leaders need to understand the importance of developing with pride.
I’m very proud of what did that time and you know within 72 hours of that meeting we had raised globally $30 billion to implement those things and within six weeks of that summit globally we had worked to raise $72 billion to implement them.
What I’m trying to say is that leadership in my view is about dealing with a world of complexity. It requires humility; it requires that you manage your ego. People don’t eat your ego. People require us to work together and that’s why the bank has a way of leadership principle that I call the baobab principal. The baobab is a big giant African tree you try to put your hand around a baobab you can’t do it. But, if I have many people stretch their hands around a baobab tree guess what can be done to tree. They know me at the bank that I am relentless because I am impatient for accelerated development. You cannot have that if you work alone you have to work with others. So effectiveness in being able to mobilize people for global action and impact is what matters to me.
QUE: On yearly basis in Nigeria, we see rising sea levels, the drought, and the food disruptions in the supply chain from all sorts of climate effects. How can we really at least for the rest of your term amplify Africa’s needs and requirements on the world stage and take more ownership of the solutions for the African Continent?
ANS: Climate change is very devastating for the world but even more devastating for Africa. We didn’t cause climate change let’s be clear about that. Africa accounts for no more than 3% of the global greenhouse gas emissions but It suffers disproportionately from the negative consequences of it.
Today we lose $7 to $15 billion a year to climate change and if we do nothing and that trajectory continues it will easily reach close to $50 billion a year by maybe 2040. That was the kind of thing we’re talking about. When you talk about how we are being affected, you make sure that Africa’s voice is heard. I think Africa’s voice being heard is not enough. There has to be a Vella on Africa’s voice, which is really loud and clear. Africa needs a lot more financial resources to tackle climate change.
I don’t have the luxury of complaining. My job is to find solutions with my institution with support of my shareholders and we are doing that and providing exactly the kind of leadership globally for Africa. Today on climate change, let me give you a few examples of that. Adaptation to climate change is what we got to do because we didn’t cause climate change so we have to adapt to the negative consequences of it most of that will affect our farmers that would affect our waters and our streams will affect us in many ways. So, at African Development Bank as you rightly said, we put 67% right now of our resources into Climate adaptation to helping to support farmers helping countries. We know deal with the consequences of climate change; that’s what we do.
Also, I got together with former United Nations Secretary General, Ban -ki-Moon who is the Chair of the Global Center on adaptation and with the CEO of the global Center on adaptation, Professor Black Region and we ask ourselves what is it that we can do for Africa at scale and so we set up what’s called the African Adaptation Acceleration Program. That is to mobilize $25 billion for Africa to tackle climate adaptation. Today, it is the largest adaptation program in the whole world and the rest of the world is trying to copy or borrow and is it yielding results absolutely. I’ll just walk you to one of the things that we also did and what the results of that would be taking. For example, the 34 countries I mentioned to you that depend on the African Development Fund are the most vulnerable to climate change. The ones that have the least resources to actually adapt to it nine out of the 10 most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change are in Africa and they happen to be in those countries that depend on the African Development Fund. What we did was put together $429 million for intervention and we want to grow it into between $4 billion and $13 billion. Forget the money think about what it will do. For example, it will provide climate resilient agricultural Technologies for 20 million farmers.
Lack of information and how you actually know when weather patterns are going to change on you and therefore you can make your decision is one of the reasons why most rural populations cannot adapt to climate change. So it will provide climate information to over 20 million farmers and pastoralist across Africa. lt will help to rejuvenate over a million hectares of degraded land and provide about 9.8 million people with access to water and sanitation and the least goes on and so forth, that’s a kind of thing that I really believe is important.
And the other part we taking leadership is how to use markets to transfer the mark the risk climate risk that countries face into the market and so the African Development Bank pioneer what is called the African Disaster Risk Insurance facility. Essentially, what it is about is that we just pay the premium for countries to transfer their climate risk exogenous climate risk straight to the market and work. Take for example, like in Madagascar; it helped them to provide about $12 million, which allow them to be able to support over 2.2 million farmers. It helped in Malawi when they also had droughts. We supported them to be able to support over close to almost 2.5 million farmers with that now we can move further. One of the decisions we took is what we call the Africa Climate Risk lnsurance Facility for Africa (ACRIFA). It was to mobilize $1 billion to ensure every single country take care of against exogenous climate shocks. We’re trying to also build domestic Reinsurance Market and also taking some of the risk from here. Let me say something that UN Secretary General Gutteres said at the United Nations General Assembly. He said he had wanted every country and every institution to devote at least 50% to climate adaptation and 50% to climate mitigation.
He said this in his speech to the world at the UN General Assembly. He singled out the African Development Bank group and he said the African Development Bank group we were about 63% in adaptation we had far exceeded the 50% and he said African development bank is showing Global Leadership and the rest of the world should follow. That tells you the kind of leadership that we are talking on this particular issue and I take it very seriously because not only must we grow we must be mindful of the headwinds that will come from climate change and therefore be ready for it ensure ourselves adapt but make sure that our voice is heard.
You mention the $100 billion we the African Development Bank together with World Bank with other multilateral financial institutions are doing our part to make sure that we actually do the needful as regards climate adaptation. By last year we were very close to that $100 billion. We raised almost $92 billion. l know that’s success but that’s not the kind of money that we still need. I think we need to have not less than $277 billion a year to be able to fulfill all the things that it committed to determined nationally contributions to a Paris agreement so there’s quite a lot of ways to still go but I don’t think we will get there unless we increase concessional financing. We also have a lot more money in terms of global finance on climate and making sure those institutions actually work for the countries that was the least developed and most vulnerable countries because they didn’t cause it.
QUE: How would you advise Nigeria’s leaders right now to navigate the current difficult economic terrain in the country?
ANS: Well, l as a person, I don’t spend my time criticizing people. I try my best to see what I can do or working with others to see how we can we can help. It’s not easy to be a president it’s challenging. I feel for president Tinubu. I came here to see him on the 14th of February to rally around and support him to succeed because his success is actually our collective success that’s very important. I’m looking at the man in the mirror and I’m asking him to change his ways. There are a number of things we’ve got to change. First and foremost is that in dealing with the fiscal challenge that we currently have today, I think the government certainly will get our own strong support. We have a portfolio of $4.6 billion today in Nigeria and this year we expect to have a series of portfolio in the country that we’re going to finance with 1.76 billion. This will include a billion dollars of support that we are designing for consideration of our board for budget support for Nigeria and that will help the country a lot.
QUE: In the form of a loan?
ANS: Yeah! You know our loans are the cheapest you can ever find. It’s almost like grants you know it’s extremely concessionary, you pay 1% or a small percent on a loan you will repay for 40 years and you have 10 years moratorium on it.
Trend. I think efficiency argument is very important when one looks at the issue of debt. In the case of Nigeria, I know the Central Bank Governor is doing its best and I really commend them for what they’re trying to do on the microeconomic side to manage inflation but a big part of the challenge facing Nigeria today is just food. And you can’t fix food inflation that you have by your monetary policy.
QUE: AfDB just launched $134 million fund for food production in Nigeria
ANS: Absolutely the $134 million will allow Nigeria to be able to produce a lot more food and bring the price of food down.
I expect that those interventions would allow us to be able to get probably in the range of about a million metric tons of food by the end of March, which is additional for the country.
We supported with 118,000 hectares being cultivated for wheat, 150,000 hectares for maize planted already.
When the main season start, we will do 300,000 hectares of rice, we’ll do 300,000 hectares of maize we’ll do 150,000 hectares of cassava and 50,000 hectares of soybean and that will bring in at least another 4 million metric tons of food.
But the issue is this, we’ve got to just understand that we must get technologies into the hands of farmers if you go to a doctor and he issues you medicine but you can’t find the medicines in the pharmacy of what good are the prescriptions of the doctor? When I was the Minister of Agriculture here, we launched a program that was called an Electronic Wallet System which was by the way the first time it was ever done anywhere in the world. It is about to get seeds and fertilizers to farmers directly by their mobile phones in through electronic vouchers.
We reached 15 million farmers and we produced additional 21 million metric tons of additional food. There was food everywhere even when we had the flaw in 2012. So I’m saying all of that to say we have a big challenge.
There is other challenge with our young people and that’s why I’m delighted the African Development Bank has a program that we’ve launched here together with our joint Francis Development and other partners to the tune of $614 million.
Culled from Arise News