The African Development Bank (AfDB) President, Dr Akinwuni Adesina, says corruption is not an African issue.
Adesina said this in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Saturday.
According to him, what is important is to continue to improve transparency, accountability, and the use of public resources.
“The global financial crisis that brought the world down in 2008 was not in Africa. We have no Wall Street. That collapse came from greed, from corruption, and from fraud.
“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 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 percent corruption record.
“During my first visit to Eritrea, I was talking to UN Development Programme staff. You know what they told me? In Eritrea, corruption is zero percent.
“Why do we not talk about that? That’s the kind of thing that we want to do. 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, “When you 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.”
On how Africa could improve its position in the global value chain, Adesina expressed sadness about the continent’s constant position at the bottom of the value chain.
According to him, the fastest way to poverty is through exporting raw materials, but the highway to wealth is through global value chains.
He said this could be achieved by adding value to everything you have, from oil to gas to minerals to metals and food. We must add 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.
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