I’ve no patience for underdevelopment – AfDB President, Adesina
Dr. Akinwumi Adesina is the 8th President of the African Development Bank (AfDB). In this exclusive interview with Daily Trust, Adesina, Nigeria’s former Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, said he has no patience for underdevelopment having grown up in poverty. He speaks on investments and the need for African youth to focus on skills that will be relevant in the fourth industrial revolution.
When you assumed office as President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), you launched an agenda, which you called the High 5s. How far have you gone with the agenda?
Let me start from what my premise of work is. I grew up in a rural area. I grew out of poverty. So, I don’t have patience for underdevelopment. I don’t think people should wait for development. I have never seen anybody who is poor and wants to be comfortable in poverty. For me, as president of the African Development Bank it is how do we accelerate the development of the continent.
The second thing I will say is that when it comes to the issue of being President of the African Development Bank, I don’t see it as a position, I don’t see it as a job. I see it as a mission because I am driven to make sure that we can take many hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and we can transform our continent in a way that gives us pride.
I am a big believer that if you are not ashamed of something, you won’t change it. Be ashamed of it, you will change it. I looked at the situation when I became president and I found out that Africa didn’t have electricity. I was ashamed of it. I said we were going to change it because it can’t be that since Thomas Edison developed the light bulb, we’re still struggling to light the bulb.
At the African Development Bank, we have five areas of focus, which we call the High 5s. One is light up and power Africa, to feed Africa, to industrialise Africa, to integrate Africa and to
improve the quality of the lives of the people of Africa.
How have you been implementing each of the priority areas?
Let me start with the first one which has to do with electricity. We’re investing today $15 billion in the energy sector, and this is to leverage anything between $45 billion and $50 billion from the private sector to the energy sector. We are involved in financing power generation, power transmission, and power distribution. We are also involved in helping Africa to have the right energy mix so as to have enough power for industrialisation.
So, what have we done? Let me start from Nigeria and then go up the continent. In Nigeria, we have invested roughly about $400 million in the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) to help to improve transmission because transmission lines are like exhaust pipes. If the exhaust pipe is broken, the fuel efficiency of your car goes down. It’s the same thing with transmission. If you have weak transmission, it doesn’t matter how much power you generate, you will lose quite a lot of it. We have also invested in helping to diversify the energy mix. We have projects that we have financed in Jigawa, which is supposed to look at solar. Sunlight is not a problem in Nigeria. The whole of the North is so hot. I worked a lot in the North. Sometimes, it can burn your skin. All we have to do is take some cables, connect to the sun and we’re fine.
We are investing heavily now to help unlock the renewable energy potential that we have. We are also investing in helping to deal with the liquidity problem that exists in the Nigeria power value chain. The Nigeria Bulk Electricity Trading (NBET) has a liquidity problem in terms of the DisCos being able to pay back. So, we provided guarantees to cover the defaults to NBET.
So, these are some of the things were trying to do to solve the problem of the power sector in Nigeria. We have also the Nigeria Rural Electrification Project, which is focused on providing electricity to well over 500,000 households in Nigeria, most of that is from mini grid and off grid systems. As you can see, our investments are quite significant in this area.
When you take a look at the African level, we have invested in what is called the Noor Ouarzazate, which is the world’s largest solar power plant in Morocco. We have done about 800 megawatts for them. We also invested in what is called Lake Turkana Project in Kenya. Its 340 megawatts. It’s the largest wind power plant in Africa and we invested in it plus the transmission lines. We invested also in geothermal energy because it can produce a lot of energy.
When people talk, they always talk about the potentials that Africa has. I don’t believe in potentials. I think the only potential that matters is potential that is unlocked.
What impacts have some of these projects had?
From 2015 to date, on power alone, we have helped to connect 16 million people to electricity. On feeding Africa, which is agriculture, we have helped to provide food security and access to modern technologies for 70 million farmers. If you take the third, that is the one about industrialising Africa, the key is how do you connect people to source of finance? So, we invest in private sector companies, but we have to connect people to get access to finance from those private sector companies. Between 2015 and now, we have helped to connect access to finance for 9 million people.
When you take a look on integrating Africa, which has to do with infrastructure, we do massive investment in infrastructure. We have helped to connect 55 million people to improved access to transport just within those few years. Without water, without sanitation, you have nothing. In 3 years, we have 31 million people connected to improved water and sanitation.
We have a very rigorous way in which we measure results. For, me, development finance is about accountability to those you are supposed to finance. I tell my guys at the bank all the time, as president of African Development Bank, I don’t have the luxury of sleeping because it is a huge responsibility to be asked to transform a continent. So, we’ve got to keep moving at the speed that people require and the accountability that is required.
The last thing I will say about the High 5s is that when we developed them, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) did an external assessment of the High 5s of the bank. And what did they find? They found that if Africa achieves those High 5s, it would have achieved 90 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and that Africa would have achieved 90 per cent of Agenda 2063 of the African Union. We’ll achieve them because I’m not used to failure. It has to work.
The migration of African youth to Europe is high and people say the youth ought to have been a resource for African development. What is the AfDB doing in this regard?
If there is any part of my job that keeps me awake at night it is this problem because what is supposed to be a demographic asset cannot become a problem. So, what we have to do is ensure that as a continent that has 420 million young people, we must be able to create jobs for them. I don’t mean any kind of jobs. I mean quality jobs that can sustain and maintain quality of life.
Today, what is supposed to be an asset is being eroded by unemployment and the will, the capacity, the excitement, the passion and the hope of the young people are being sucked out of them. When I finished school in Nigeria, in those days, I got a job. The choice you had was whether the job you had was going to allow you to buy a Volkswagen Beetle car or a Passat car. But today, that is not there.
Today in Africa, one third of all the 420 million young people have no jobs. You’ve got 12 million of them hitting the labour market every year. You only have three million jobs available to them. Another third of them, who said that they are employed, are actually under-employed. They are in vulnerable employment. What is somebody with a PhD doing driving a taxi? It is not the right type of employment. The biggest thing we must do on the continent is to make sure that we create quality, decent jobs for the young people.
When I became President of the African Development Bank, a week before I took over, I went to Goree Island in Senegal. When I got to Goree Island, I stood there at this door which they call ‘The Door of No Return’. It was from there that they took the slaves and dumped them into boats. For me, it was a very sobering moment, because I was thinking to myself that this was the place where young talents of Africa were shipped against their volition into slavery. But today, on their own volition, the young people get on rickety boats, head out to the Mediterranean Sea and thousands of then die.
As far as I am concerned, I don’t believe the future of African youth lies in Europe and I also don’t believe their future lies in the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Neither does it lie in the dunes of the Sahara Desert. It must lie in an Africa growing well, creating quality jobs and creating hope for its own people because development has to have dignity in it.
There is no way we are going to let other people take up our own youth. That’s an asset that we have. That’s why at the African Development Bank, we launched a massive programme called Jobs for Youths in Africa. I launched it as soon as I came back from Goree Island. It is to help African countries create 25 million jobs. The sectors we are investing heavily in are, one, agriculture: It is the biggest job creating sector. But, it is agriculture as a business, not as a way of life.
We have a programme called Enable Youth. That programme is working in eight countries. We have invested over $400 million in it to get young people that are getting into agriculture as a business have access to finance. It’s being done in Malawi, Zambia, Ghana, Togo and several countries today.
The second is the ICT sector. The ICT sector is a big sector, and it can create huge number of jobs for young people. We invested $40 million in the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology. It is a joint programme with a university in the United States that runs World Class Masters Programme in ICTs. 100 per cent of all the people in that programme get jobs before they finish. Some of them don’t ever get to work for anybody and will never work for anybody.
Nigerians have brains. Africans have brains. They have talents. We just have to make sure we are using capital to make them unlock them. Look, when you see Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, they were all young people. Our problem is that we think that young people are not bankable. They may not have money that you can call collateral, but they’ve got ideas. What you are investing in is not age, what you are investing in is brain. That’s one of the things we’ve got to change.
For African Development Bank, we are putting our capital at risk on behalf of young people. It’s a mark of confidence that we have. We set up three funds to do that. There’s something called Boost Africa Fund. It’s $200 million, together with the European Commission to support allied state businesses of young people. I believe in young people a lot. There is another fund, which is a venture capital fund for young people. We’re doing quite a lot of these to support them.
In Senegal, we invested in the Senegal Technology Park, which is helping Senegal today to create 35,000 quality jobs for young people.
In Nigeria, I am excited about what the government is planning to do here on the Nigeria Innovation Fund, which I discussed with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. We have committed to put in $500 million to support young creative entrepreneurs that have great ideas. I am excited about what we are doing but I am going to say something that is linked to education in Nigeria and other African countries: we are training people for the jobs of the past. We are not training them for the jobs of the future. As a result, they will get certificates but they won’t get jobs.
Today, a study by Boston and Consulting Group shows that one-third of all the jobs available, the skills that people will have for them tomorrow, will be gone. The skills tomorrow are very different. You can’t have it. Another study done by Mackenzie shows that 50 per cent of the courses that students learned in their year one in the universities will be outdated by the time they get to year four. So, the whole issue of artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, these are the things that are going to control the world. That is why, we as the African Development Bank, are investing today in 130 coding centres. We’re working with Microsoft and Google.
I believe that coding must become compulsory in every school because coding is the future. Those that can code are those that will be able to connect to that fourth industrial revolution. The world wants more people in computer engineering and coding. That’s where the future is. So, we must deliberately shift what we are training our kids in otherwise we will be marginalising them.
Final comment
Mr President is doing something on the Lake Chad, which I think ought to be applauded. When you take a look at the Lake Chad Basin, it used to be 25,000 square kilometres. Today, it is one tenth of its size. A lot of the problems that Nigeria has today emanates from the livelihoods that have gone from there.
President Buhari is leading a major effort, which is called inter-basin water transfer to move water from the Congo to the Lake Chad area and the president has charged me to help to lead an effort to raise $50 billion. I salute it with all pleasure. I think the president is doing the right thing because without peace and stability, we can’t have any investment; we can’t have anything. This is a very important thing to constantly look at and that’s why the African Development Bank is investing to support the Nigerian government’s Presidential Initiative on the North East, of rebuilding the North East.
You cannot ask people to live in dilapidated houses just because they don’t have anything. They didn’t create the terrorists. They didn’t create all the problems. We have IDPs everywhere. That’s why as a bank, we are providing $280 million to support the North East rebuilding effort of water, sanitation hygiene and skills so that people can get their lives back together.
When I look at the economies of West Africa, and other regions, you cannot integrate fragile economies. You can only integrate resilient economies. Therefore, investing in building resilient economy is a necessity.
I am going to say something that is linked to education in Nigeria and other African countries: we are training people for the jobs of the past. We are not training them for the jobs of the future. As a result, they will get certificates but they won’t get jobs