When Dr Akinwumi Adesina assumed office as the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB) almost a decade ago, it was with so much fanfare. It is ironical that the bang that accompanied the onset of his tenure has been replaced by an unfolding whimper, eerily signifying 10 years of disastrous performance.
On assumption of office in September 2015, Adesina promised to dedicate himself to expanding opportunities and unlocking the potential embedded in African countries’ youth, women, natural resources and the private sector. He pledged to unleash a new wave of growth and development shared by all.
In pursuit of the realization of his new vision for Africa, Adesina came up with what he termed the High 5s development priorities for Africa, at once reflecting his predilection for bombast and showboating. He condensed the agenda into seemingly digestible objectives, raising the hope of millions on the continent that something truly revolutionary was afoot: Light up and Power Africa; Feed Africa; Industrialise Africa; Integrate Africa; and Improve the quality of life of the People of Africa.
Elaborating on what each of the High 5s aimed to achieve, Adesina said it had become imperative to “light up and power Africa” because energy powers economies. He wondered why Africa, with virtually unquantifiable resources for both conventional and renewable energy, could not produce power for homes, infrastructure development and industries alike. Good talk!
With regard to the Feed Africa goal, Adesina noted that it was inconceivable that a continent with 65% arable land, water, diverse agro-ecological richness and sunshine has remained a net food-importing region. He was emphatic that Africa must meet the growing food needs of its people by rapidly transforming the agriculture sector.
He passionately promised to deliver on this. The AfDB helmsman also pledged to work with African political leaders to fast-track the continent’s industrialisation. True talk.
To actualise Africa’s integration, Adesina vowed to open up African countries through high-quality regional infrastructure — especially rail, transnational highways, information and communications, air and maritime transport—to enable them to witness a phenomenal boost in intra-Africa and global trade.
To improve the quality of life of Africans, Adesina promised that AfDB under him would promote inclusive growth policies to lift millions out of poverty.
Unfortunately, not one of those five lofty objectives moved an inch beyond rhetorics.
Failure of the High 5s
Ten years down the line, Africa is obviously worse off than when these declarations and pledges were made.
Back in 2015, Africa’s installed grid-based power generation capacity was a dismal 194 GW. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons that almost 10 years on, total capacity has barely edged up to 240 GW in spite of all the hype and Bank resources thrown at the power sector not just by the multilateral lender, but also African Union leaders. In 2015 when Adesina pledged to “light up and power Africa”, about 600 million people on the continent had no access to electricity. Just a few months ago, the IEA also reported that an unbelievable 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still lacked access to electricity. Per capita energy consumption in the whole of Africa now stands at a miserable 181 K/h compared to 6,500 Kw/h and 13,000 Kw/h for Europe and the US, respectively.
The sordid implication of these numbers has continued to be observed in even the potentially better-developed African countries such as Nigeria and South Africa, whose governments declared emergencies in their power sector over the last few years.
Ironically, a hurriedly put-together Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit, which hyped to deliver electricity to 300 million Africans by 2030, held in January in Tanzania rather belatedly, a few months to Adesina’s exit from that Bank. Sponsored in part by the AfDB, the summit perversely proves that nothing of note had been achieved in Adesina’s ambitious bid to “Light up and Power Africa” over the past decade.
When the High 5s agenda was proclaimed, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015 report revealed that 52.3 million people in Africa experienced severe to moderate food insecurity. By 2022, the figure had gone up by 15.5 percentage points. Last year, 37 % of households in sub-Saharan Africa were declared severely food insecure, with fears that more bad news would come by 2030 if current trends continued. The February World Bank 2025 Food Security Update indicates that an estimated 61.6 million people are food insecure in East Africa alone, while nearly 50 million people are projected to face food insecurity in Western and Central Africa. The implication is that the number of food-insecure Africans has increased from 52.3 million in 2015 to about 111.6 million in 2025.
Analysts now wonder how a supposedly famed “agriculture expert,” before taking up the AfDB leadership, failed to deliver positive impact on Africa’s chronic food insecurity after two full terms at the continent’s premier development institution.
Africa’s industrial development records have not fared better. According to available data, Africa’s industrial development was very low in 2015, with its share of global manufacturing value added (MVA) being around 1.8 percent. A full decade on, the continent’s share of MVA has been all but flat at around 2%, making it still the least industrialised region in the world. This means that hardly any gains have been made in the intervening 10 years.
Africa’s effort at integration is perhaps the only area where some marginal improvement has been realised, thanks in part to the inauguration of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) championed by AFREXIMBANK. In 2015, intra-African trade accounted for 16.2% of Africa’s total merchandise trade. By current projections, intra-African trade is expected to represent around 18% of total African trade this year, with the potential to increase significantly with the full implementation of the AfCFTA.
Even so, the AfCFTA, which was expected to facilitate the integration of all countries on the continent, faces many challenges. Poor infrastructure, transportation, logistics and border controls still hinder movement and trade. The Economic Commission for Africa’s March 2024 publication reports that African countries still trade more outside the continent than amongst themselves in spite of the AfCFTA official take-off in January 2021.
Yet, Africa’s share of global trade remains, stubbornly, at 3%, indicating that not much has changed over the past decade. Perversely, intra-African trade as a share of global trade declined from 14.5% in 2021 to 13.7% in 2022. Over the same period, intra-African exports dropped from 18.22% to 17.89% while intra-African imports dipped from 12.81% to 12.09%
The foregoing spate of depressing statistics suggests that the quality of life of people in Africa could not have improved since the inauguration of the High 5s at the AfDB. The World Bank has revealed that last year, while sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 16% of the world’s population, 67% of its people were living in extreme poverty. The Bank estimates that the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living below the international poverty line of $2.15 per person per day increased from 413 million in 2015 to 464 million in 2025.
With such data, it is clear that Africa has regressed drastically within the almost 10 years of Adesina’s tenure. Africa would have been better for it if only Adesina borrowed a leaf from Dr Babacar Ndiaye, one of the outstanding Presidents of the AfDB, and established distinct institutions to drive his so-called High 5s. Indeed, appropriate instituional frameworks would have spared the High 5s the disastrous grief that has become their lot. The facts and figures could not speak louder.
Little wonder analysts have waved off and derided the High 5s as Hype5s. Some close watchers of the AfDB told Banking & Finance that Adesina probably knew from the onset that achieving the unwieldy agenda was a tall order. According to them, his primary objective for enunciating the agenda was merely to give him hollow bragging opportunities ostensibly to project Africa while engaging in blatant self-promotion.
Inelegant financials
AfDB’s financials under Adesina require a special edition to address. For now, it is worthy to note the gap between fund approvals and disbursements. It is wide. For instance, in December 2017, the AfDB approved a $324 million loan for two renewable energy projects in Morocco and Cote d’Ivoire with the aim of increasing power supply and supporting economic growth. But as of June 2024, only $81.5 million had been disbursed.
In like manner, in December 2021, the Bank approved a $210 million loan for Phase 1 of Nigeria’s Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones Programme (SAPZS-1), which the AfDB was scheduled to provide $160 million and the Africa Growing Together Fund (AGTF) $50 million. However, by December 2024, only 1.61% of the total loan had been disbursed. A run through of other programmes and projects shows similar variance between approvals and disbursements.
High staff turnover
Even at the Bank, Adesina is unpopular over allegations of maladministration, abuse of office, nepotism and highhandedness, which almost caused him to lose his second five-year term in office.
The United States, a powerful non-regional member, had questioned his integrity following the allegations of “impunity and bad governance” against him, insisting on an independent investigation.
The AfDB board had him undergo a protracted, gruelling probe for unethical conduct and use of Bank resources for private gains. However, after much controversy and bickering at the Bank and in the international financial community over the scandal, Adesina got the backing of regional member-country leaders and Bank Governors through the intervention of Nigeria’s former President, Olusegun Obasanjo. Against the odds, he survived the scandal as the Ethics Committee of the Bank later cleared him.
Damming petitions from former and serving staff at the Bank also pointed to the unprecedented high staff turnover owing to employees’ dissatisfaction with his abrasive style. This, they say, has caused him to have as many as four different chiefs of staff under his watch, with some Vice Presidents and other top-ranking officials quitting in frustration.
To this day, many AfDB staffers wistfully recall the days when the Bank was lauded as a stable work environment. It is testament to his style that most of the petitioners and accusers insisted on anonymity, citing and fearing his penchant for vengefulness.
It is also alleged that as his tenure wound down, some eminently qualified persons were offered appointments to serve as the bank’s Senior Vice President and Vice President, declined them. Dr Adesina had to settle for Nigerian compatriots to fill these positions when those contacted allegedly rebuffed the offers.
Mismanaging the 2025 AfDB Presidential Elections
In an unprecedented fashion, through incompetence or outright collusion, the current management of the Bank appears to be working towards mismanaging the forthcoming AfDB Presidential elections. For example, in a letter dated 28th February 2025 and addressed to all the five candidates, in the race for the top job, the Secretary General of the Bank, Vincent O. Nmehielle, directed them to submit their Vision Statements (which should be formatted in Times New Roman font size 12 and must not exceed a total of ten (10) pages).
However, while other candidates complied strictly with this directive, the South African candidate, Bajabulile Swazi Tshabalala, who was a former Senior Vice President of the Bank, has been allowed to submit a whopping 44-page document. Many AfDB close watchers see this as discriminatory, biased and favouritism.
Worse still, the Adesina management is tinkering with the idea of electronic voting during the presidential elections in May. Many interested parties have warned that this is susceptible to manipulation. “What is the difficulty in counting 82 ballots, while everyone is in the room?” enthused a senior official from a regional member country.
Ego trip
Adesina exhibited his unbridled egoistic proclivity when he breached etiquette by throwing himself at US President Donald Trump at the 2017 G7 Summit in Taormina, Sicily, Italy to give the impression of close familiarity with the American leader. That raised an uproar that reverberates in the diplomatic community to this day.
Dr Adesina’s critics also point out that, given his penchant for flamboyance, he was more interested in the razzmatazz of the office, which he used as a platform for shopping for awards, social relevance and self-promotion and photo ops —A particularly scathing joke in the MDB community characterises Adesina as “the only farm inspector who goes on agriculture extension inspection in a bow tie and bathed in ever-present klieg lights!”
Among the awards he reportedly actively “shopped” for and received are national honours of Senegal, Cameroon, Madagascar, Togo, Liberia, Niger and Tunisia. The latest is Kenya. A large chunk of his remaining weeks in office is said to be devoted to more awards across Africa. This is a total departure from his predecessors who politely turned down such “honours”. Indeed, neither the disciplined Dr Omar Kabbaj nor the charismatic Dr Donald Kaberuka accepted a single of the numerous awards that were thrown at them. It was an unwritten tradition in AfDB.
Not a few have noted that in spite of Dr Adesina’s vaunted status as a technocrat, he did not engage in institution-building throughout his nearly 10 years in office. As noted earlier and echoed by several commentators, the legacy of a former AfDB president, the debonair Dr Babacar Ndiaye, who walked his talk and was instrumental to the setting up of such pan-African sister institutions as the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and Shelter Afrique, using the Bank’s powerful platform and enormous resources, was an example that would have enriched Adesina’s tenure. Ndiaye also mooted the idea of establishing a Central Bank of Africa, which the African Union has been working on.
To many informed analysts, in his 10 years in office, Dr Adesina delivered much talk and less action. If glib talk alone was the basis for assessing an institution’s performance, the AfDB under Adesina would have been an Eldorado. Words are indeed cheap.
All told, many analysts and observers are still in a quandary about why Dr Adesina, under whose watch the Bank’s capital base has risen from $93 billion to $318 billion, has delivered nothing significantly to cheer about. There is a consensus among key stakeholders, that the next AfDB President should toe a different line. They contend that Africa’s premier development institution is now, more than ever, not in need of an excitable talker and showman but a calm, result-driven visionary and performer.
