Meet the people vying to lead Africa’s top development bank

Five candidates will compete to become President of the African Development Bank in an election on Thursday during the lender’s annual meeting in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Major changes in global development finance have made the bank’s $318 billion capital more crucial to Africa’s development. Wealthy countries have cut aid spending, funding has shrunk, and borrowing costs keep changing dramatically.

Swazi Tshabalala Bajabulile
A banker with 30 years of experience, Tshabalala served as AfDB’s senior vice president until October.

The South African candidate and only woman in the race plans to transform the bank if she wins.

“The internal structure of the institution … doesn’t facilitate the right sort of sustained focus to be able to really deliver effectively on things like infrastructure,” she said. “We really should consolidate that.”

Tshabalala said if delivered properly, infrastructure would allow Africa to tap its resources – from minerals to finance to trade. She wants to create innovative financial instruments, building on the AfDB’s foray into hybrid capital.

Amadou Hott
Senegal’s former economy minister brings decades of banking experience from Lagos to London.

He would focus the AfDB on African financial self-reliance by mobilising resources and designing projects to keep private money on the continent.

“Revenue mobilisation is number one,” he said.

Hott said revenue collection must rise – the average tax to GDP ratio in Africa is 16%, versus the OECD average of 34% – which could boost credit ratings, lower borrowing costs and marshal money for pressing needs, including power and infrastructure.

“The money is out there,” he said, adding that a lack of ready-made well-structured projects that reduced risks and delivered returns had limited private sector involvement.

Samuel Munzele Maimbo
A World Bank vice president on leave while campaigning, the Zambian brings three decades of development finance experience.

As president, he would launch behind-the-scenes work to gather data, fix the financial systems and streamline regulations to enable Africa’s 54 nations to trade with and finance each other.

“Now more than ever before, we’ve got to get trade working on the continent,” he said. “If we’re only trading 15% of our products amongst each other, our products are either rotting or they’re being undervalued.”

Maimbo – who has backing from the Southern African Development Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa – wants a continent-wide approach to everything from debt sustainability to revenue collection and infrastructure.

Sidi Ould Tah
Mauritania’s ex-finance minister and presidential adviser has run the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa for the past decade.

“The AfDB must break free from legacy constraints and position itself as the driver of Africa’s economic sovereignty,” Tah said.

He focuses on four points: mobilising a broader scope of capital, reforming financial systems, harnessing demographics by making the “informal sector” more official (this sector employs 83% of Africans) and building climate-resistant infrastructure.

By partnering with the private sector, other multilateral institutions and regional development banks, the AfDB can turn every $1 raised into $10 of productive capital, he said.

Abbas Mahamat Tolli
Tolli has held top financial positions across Central Africa, including as Chad’s finance minister, regional central bank governor and president of the Development Bank of Central African States.

He focuses on self-sufficiency, from agriculture to finance, and wants to strengthen governance to cut inefficient, unclear spending that has buried countries in debt without development.

Africa suffers a lot of financial outflows due to tax evasion or mismanagement of resources, he said, adding, “We need to better manage.”

To make it work, Tolli envisions a “major overhaul” of the AfDB’s operational model by pooling risk, strengthening public-private partnerships and digitising financing mechanisms.

Tolli said his own life — tending goats as a child after fleeing civil war aged 6 — mirrored Africa’s journey and gave him unique insight into how to lift all those on the continent.