I don’t want to be remembered for my many fights — Obaseki

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, that was not in Africa. We have no Wall Street. That collapse came from greed, from corruption, 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 to continue to improve transparency, accountability and the use of public resources.”

According to Adesin, he discovered during his first visit to Eritrea that the country has zero per cent corruption record.

“During my first visit to Eritrea, I was talking to UN Development Programme staff. You know what they told me? That, in Eritrea, corruption is zero per cent.

“Why do we not talk about that? That’s the kind of thing that we want to do. For us 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 billlion 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. (NAN)