Why are you interested in running for the presidency of the AfDB? 

To be honest, it is out of love for this continent, but also out of deep concern for Africa. Why am I running? I have been at the World Bank for 23 years, but the last five to seven years have been particularly difficult. Africa is growing. We have got larger average growth than any of the rest of the world. We have got more than 15 countries which are growing at more than six per cent. We have a generation of leaders on the continent that you can feel they know what they want for their continent, but they are struggling with how to get it done in terms of financial constraints. I want to be part of that story. 

The concern comes from the fact that even with that growth, we have too many Africans who are being left behind. We have young people who are asking for jobs. We have communities who want to see development in their neighbourhoods, and we have governments who are still struggling with that. That was the chief motivation. 

I have been privileged enough to be, in the last five years, Director for the World Bank’s fundraising team, IDA, to be Chief of Staff to two World Bank presidents, and then in my current role as Vice President for Budget Performance Review and Strategic Planning. I sit in on many of these conversations where issues are discussed. I want to be part of the generation that says, ‘look, enough is enough. Let us focus on getting Africa growing as quickly as we possibly can’. 

We have heard you talk about wanting to see Africa grow and develop, but what are your ideas about economic development and growth? What are the key policy areas you wish to focus on? 

I want to focus on growth on the continent because I think that is the one thing that, if we get right, would help us address issues around debt; it would help us deal with all of the other issues. So, I start with the question of how we get Africa to grow. I want to double down on our traditional sectors, like mining and agriculture, where we have good examples of areas where we have had progress. 

The one thing that I want to do in those sectors is increase the size of our deals. Oftentimes, in agriculture, we have a nice backward linkages programme for rice. We have nothing for wheat. Oftentimes, our development institutions, and this is one of the lessons I have learned at the World Bank, focus on being equal to everybody. The result is that whenever we get large resources, we give everybody a small piece; they all do a small project, and then we go back and ask for more money. I think it is time for us to make bigger bets, to say, ‘in this region, let’s put all our efforts into this particular agricultural programme. Get it so big that if neighbouring countries are not importing wheat from Ukraine, they are importing wheat from Nigeria.’ So that’s one thing I want to do with the traditional sectors. There are newer sectors in the field that are creating more jobs than we appreciate. 

Nollywood is a fantastic example that generates more than 10 per cent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange; employing possibly more people than agriculture today. We have film industries in Morocco, Egypt, and South Africa, but as development institutions, we have been a bit reluctant to get into that field. I want the African Development Bank to partner with the Afreximbank, which has a programme for the creative industries to build film studios as national assets. 

So, whenever a producer wants to make a film about deserts, he goes to Morocco, and they want to do a film about Savannah and Victoria Falls, we are ready for them. My strategy is to go sector by sector, identifying areas that can create jobs, and then focus much effort on getting the continental free trade agreement working. 

I know this is one area which we have talked about for many years. Every single time we meet, we talk about it. But that statistic of 15 per cent trading among ourselves has been 15 per cent for many years. When we talk about Africa’s contribution to global trade, it has been three per cent for many years. If you go back to the 1980s, it was four per cent. In the 60s, it was five per cent. If you look forward, by 2030, it will be around 2.7 per cent. It means that the challenge is structural, and we must deal with this as a structural issue. 

What I want to do at the African Development Bank is make sure that when we are investing in things like pipelines and rail, we are not doing it country by country. We have a limited balance sheet. Let’s make sure that whenever we build a pipeline, we are building it to connect regions. There’s no sector where I cannot point to a good example that works. The role of the African Development Bank is to find those ideas, replicate them, scale up, provide financing, and spend less time doing studies and additional plans and all of those. It is about execution in Africa. It is about implementation, and that is what I want to focus on. 

We are excited that you are talking about the creative industry in this manner. What is your plan for the entertainment industry? 

Part of it comes from the fact that I am an acrylic painter. If I was not campaigning for this position, I would be advertising my paintings on my Instagram page. But you see, art has taught me many things. One is that when you start, when you are painting, you always start with a background and you work yourself backwards. 

You paint the landscape, you paint the furthest thing, and then you work into detail. When you are thinking about development, you always have to start with what is the long-term goal, and you work backwards. The second thing it taught me is you are going to make mistakes. The paintbrush is going to fall on your canvas. You are going to mix colours that don’t quite work. You are comfortable correcting them because sometimes there is a happy coincidence in those mistakes. So, I do not panic when things go wrong. I am also one who is willing to experiment. You throw in as much paint as you mix, and eventually, you will come up with a painting that works. When I am painting, I always think about the person who produces the canvas, the person who produces the paint, the brush, the gallery you exhibit at; the number of jobs is endless. 

I want to move away from the idea that development institutions like the African Development Bank can only finance projects similar to what the World Bank and others have done. We have to find African solutions for things that work. We are storytellers. We are creative. We are narrators. Let us build the industry. Let us use them to change the narrative that what comes out of Africa has to be negative. It does not have to be. So that’s where I’m coming from. 

Are you worried about the number of Africans that are leaving the continent to seek greener pastures abroad? 

Sitting in Washington, it has always been a passion of mine to hire as many Africans as I can into the bank. Ten or 20 years ago, I had a longer line of people trying to come in than I had jobs for. Today, I have young Africans who come and say, ‘I am going home’. I have staff who have said, ‘look, two years of doing it, I want to come home’. And I have gone to the 27 countries on this campaign and seen the number of people who are doing fantastic businesses who are saying, ‘look, I was in Europe for five years, I came back’. 

I am worried about those who are still traveling and struggling in these markets. I think the notion that an African young man or woman can only progress by being a migrant is something we have to dispel quickly. We have to give our young people hope. We have to support them. And I think if we do more of that, then we will make sure that the youth bubble on the continent pays us a dividend and is not a burden on our continent going forward. So, I am quite optimistic. 

The challenge we have, and this is the part where I always say that in development, oftentimes it is not trying to come up with a new conversation, but an honest conversation. That is what is missing in development. Our development model and my institution at the World Bank are as guilty as any other. A lot of our government programmes are still structurally designed on the notion that it is foreign investment that comes to develop our country. It is a tax incentive for foreigners to come. And yet the guy who has been in business is struggling with the same taxes. The foreigner enjoys five years of tax incentives, changes his business name, acquires one more partner, and gets another five years of tax incentives. We must move away from that. And if there’s one thing I can achieve that I would be proudest of at the African Development Bank is the notion that we need to double down on our domestic private sector, our indigenous private sector; to give them incentives exercised by Nigerians, by Zambians, and include incentives for buying from other African countries. I don’t think we should be shy about doing that at all, because that is what the rest of the world has been doing. If there is anything that is coming out of the recent conversations globally it is that people are putting their nations first. We have to put Africa first. That is where I am at the moment. 

Are you optimistic that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will succeed in improving trade between African countries? 

We do not have the option of it not succeeding. As fast as the tariffs around the world are going up, we have to bring them down here on the continent. I want to use the three levers that we have at the African Development Bank to address these issues. The first is the African Development Bank, which has three levels – voice, financing and the people. I want us to use our voices to have these conversations much more candidly. I want the President of the African Development Bank, even more, I want the Chief Economist of the African Development Bank to cause good trouble, to speak candidly about these issues in terms of our Sky policies. It does not make sense. Right now, I have a team here that is planning on going back to Zambia. There is no direct flight. They are going to have to spend the night somewhere else. Let us not shy away from these conversations. Let us not go to conferences and talk about continental free trade agreements and not discuss the issues about our open skies policies, the issues about our visa. Now, some of these are politically uncomfortable, but let us have the discussions. It might be that there are reasons we want to stick with this particular model, but it cannot work. Let us have the conversation. The second thing I want to do is to use our finances to unlock some of the blocks and problems that we have with trade, for example. 

As challenging as travelling by air is, it works in the sense that when I check in at the airport in Abuja and if I am going to go to Addis Ababa, stop in Harare and get to Lusaka, I will provide them with my information. I will check in my bag. My information will fly to Lusaka. My bags will fly to Lusaka and the only thing I have to worry about along the way is sitting back and enjoying my flight. In Europe, you can drive from Paris to Vienna. In India, with a billion people, you do the same. You structurally cannot compete if your driver from South Africa to DRC has to stop in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia each time. 

You will not find me talking about some fancy conference where we are going to all finally get the Africa Free Trade Agreement working. My job is to stay in Abidjan, to work with our teams and to say, ‘Look, these are the uncomfortable truths. Now, some of these are political issues.’ 

There are some basic things where non-tariff barriers are much more burdensome than some of the financial barriers that we have. I want to make sure that we have young people who are working in trade and investment, who are partnering with their partners to identify these non-tariff barriers. Because sometimes it is not that anybody wants them anymore. It is just that the inertia of development is such that it is very easy to enact a new rule. It is very difficult to take it off the books. 

We must be that institution that is willing to take the hot shots, that is willing to go to a country and say, look, ‘we have analysed your trade policies between Zambia and Tanzania. Here is why we think you should reduce it.’ 

All these initiatives will cost money. How will you finance your ideas? 

So, in my field of raising billions of dollars for the World Bank, the big secret about raising significant amounts of money is that you do not talk about money. 

And the reason I say this is that if I take the African Development Bank, it has an annual lending volume of about $8 billion. Now, if I go out there and say, we need more money to develop Africa, we need to re-capitalise the bank, nobody will listen to me.