Akinwumi Ayodeji Adesina is an intuitive reformer with an intelligent quotient in the mould of a genius.
He graduated with a first class honours in agricultural economics from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) in 1981 at the tender age of 21. He was the first to bag that distinction in the department.
Adesina is an outspoken activist who expresses his views without equivocation. On May 2, he told an audience in Abuja that Nigeria’s per capita GDP has dropped from $1, 847 in 1960 to $824, an indication of higher level of poverty.
Adesina was born on February 6, 1960, eight months before Nigeria’s independence. He does not know how we fared during that period. His analogy is based on economic data available to him.
The presidency responded with claims that Adesina’s analogy bordered on political loquaciousness.
Government flaunted data that suggested that Adesina had misled the public with his analogy. However, those of us who were old enough to know how Nigerians fared in 1960 can say who is telling the truth.
The truth is that the outgoing president of the African Development Bank (AfDB) is an embodiment of transparency, economic shrewdness and unalloyed loyalty to the service of humanity.
Everything he touches shines because he handles his assignments with irreprehensible commitment to duty.
In his days as Nigeria’s minister of agriculture, his ministry stood out from the colossal failure of the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
He formulated a policy that demystified the scam that plagued fertilizer and other agricultural input subsidies and rendered federal government assistance to farmers ineffective.
He founded an electronic data base that circumvented the corrupt middlemen who diverted subsidized fertilisers meant for peasant farmers to the market and rendered the farmers useless in their businesses.
The electronic data had details of the farmers entitled to the farm inputs and they were all contacted with alerts on their phone lines. They all collected their entitlements directly to the frustration of the fraudulent middlemen.
The result was massive increases in crop output. Nigeria’s annual crop output surged by a record 31 million metric tons. There was enough food in the markets and the balance in supply and demand of food items in the markets resulted in lower prices.
Consumers could buy at moderate prices. Nigeria’s food import bills plummeted as a result of the surge in local food production.
His performance in the Ministry of Agriculture was so outstanding that he won international awards despite the poor performance of the administration he served. He was awarded the World Food Prize. Forbes Africa named him Africa Person of the year 2013.
Adesina’s tenure as minister of agriculture ended in 2015 with the defeat of Goodluck Jonathan by Muhammadu Buhari in the presidential election. However, Jonathan’s defeat turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
A few months later, a grander opportunity offered itself. This time the Achiever was assigned to serve the whole of Africa not just his country, Nigeria.
Adesina was elected president of the AfDB. He inherited AfDB as a modest global development bank but transformed it into one of the world’s largest multilateral development institutions with an AAA rating that gives it prime access to capital markets.
Under him, the capital base of AfDB rose phenomenally from a scant $93 billion to $318 billion. That is an increase of 241.9 per cent.
In 2024, the bank approved $10.6 billion for projects and disbursed $6.4 billion for the projects, a record 15 per cent increase from the performance in 2023.
The bank’s concessional window known as the African Development Fund also witnessed its largest replenishment as the sum of $8.9 billion was raised under Adesina’s watch.
AfDB under Adesina influenced the lives of half a billion Africans. Adesina fashioned out his list of priorities for the bank as soon as he was elected president in 2015.
Known as “high five”, the following items made the list: “Feed Africa, light up and power Africa, integrate Africa, industrialise Africa and improve the quality of life of Africans”.
Adesina knows that Africa is not just a Dark Continent due to economic backwardness but because it has the highest number of people in the globe without access to electricity.
He consequently directed his development funds toward investment in electricity. AfDB has impacted numerous African countries and their citizens with investments in electrification projects.
Adesina’s first term ended in January 2020. Donald John Trump had just been elected U.S. president. The enigmatic American president erected obstacles on the path to Adesina’s second term election.
A group of sponsored insiders within the bank petitioned its ethics committee accusing Adesina of 16 ethical violations. The American representative on the board of the bank demanded a thorough investigation of the allegations by the bank’s ethics committee.
The committee investigated the allegations and cleared Adesina. The U.S. rejected the report of the committee and demanded an independent investigation which is against the rule of the bank.The bank bent its rule and ordered Mary Robinson, a former president of the Republic of Ireland to investigate the committee’s report.The Robinson committee did a thorough work which eventually upheld the veracity of the bank’s committee report.
Adesina was consequently cleared of all the flippant allegations and re-elected for a second term which ends on September 1, 2025.
Adesina has led AfDB to greater heights. The bank has been ranked the fourth most transparent development bank in the world.
He has a number of innovations to his credit during his eventful leadership of the bank in the last 10 years. He was the first to introduce hybrid capital instruments. He responded to the COVID-19 global crisis with a $3 billion social bond which was followed by a $10 billion crisis response facility.
In his 10 years as president of AfDB, Akinwumi Adesina, the son of a farmer, has demonstrated his unmatched transparency and ability to respond to complex crises. He has left a very large shoe for his successor.