Dr. Akinwumi Adeshina has been re-elected as the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), for another five-year term. The re-election took place electronically during AfDBs’ 2020 Annual Meeting in August. But days after his re-election, analysts are already asking what will a post-pandemic economy in Africa look like? What contributions will Adeshina and his management put on the ground to help ensure inclusive growth in Africa?
Of course, a day before Adeshina’s election, he had said he wanted to seek a second term in office, and being given a second chance would assure the need for unity to enable the continent to pull together and stay focused on the goal of fighting the effect of the pandemic on Africa’s economy. According to him, “pulling together has always been the strength of the African Development Bank.”
He said that Africa has lost a decade’s worth of economic growth due to the pandemic and that despite Africa’s recovery being long, the need for unity would be needed now more than ever in the AfDB.
“Now we must help Africa to build back, boldly, but smartly, paying greater attention to quality growth: health, climate, and the environment,” he added.
He also disclosed that the bank’s Board of Directors was able to launch support schemes to Adesina said his first term as President of the Bank saw the implementation of the five strategic goals for Africa’s development, called the “High 5s”.cushion the effects of the pandemic. “
Adesina said the impact of his five years as President had enabled 18 million Africans have access to electricity, 141 million people have benefitted from improved agricultural technologies for food security. 15 million people have access to finance, 101 million people have access to improved transport and 60 million people have gained access to water and sanitation.
“With these positive results, President Adesina asked the Board of Governors to renew their trust in him for the next five years. “Dear Governors, these Annual Meetings are my opportunity to offer you my services and seek a second term as President of the African Development Bank. I do so with humility. I do so with an acute sense of duty and commitment. I do so to serve Africa and our Bank,” he stated.
Of course, he got his second term at a difficult time when it is clear that the world is currently in the midst of some kind of inflection point. But in confronting this inflection point, will Adeshina be able to deliver impact beyond that which he had delivered in his first five years as President of the AfDB, enabling more Africans to have access to electricity, access to health, water and sanitation, access to improved food security, access to finance?
Andy Grove, noted author and pioneer, introduced the concept of strategic inflection points as moments in time when the fundamentals of business change, requiring a major shift in how we operate. The dilemma is when to take action — move too early, you will waste resources; wait for a while, you will get buried.
The COVID-19 presents no such dilemma since this inflection point is here-and-now, and serious. Luckily the world is easing out of it, and the mortality rate is low due to social distancing and lockdowns but the impact on the global economy is big. In Africa, it is huge, something not witnessed in our lifetime.
Analysts point out the dismal disappearance of normality in the way people live and do things, it’s important to acknowledge how awful this is going to be for a great many people who are dependent on daily wages and monthly salaries. Many companies may soon refuse to pay, forcing workers to quit.
Observers assert that pandemics have often catalyzed social change. Water, sewage, and public health authorities all emerged from previous epidemics. Social change can also come from economic change, such as industrialization and the creation of the first instance of mass inequality in what came to be called the Gilded Age.
They say Dr. Adeshina should work better with African leaders and policymakers to work on early warnings scenarios, so as to be able to pull people out of the cave of economic pains. And that using inflection points, AfDB, and African leaders can build scenarios and early warning systems for the post-corona future of Africa. This will be like a “thin-ice” moment because things are moving very quickly but the framework may still be useful for decision-makers.
The proposed framework, they insist, will articulate two (or more) crucial uncertainties, create a story about the future states that different values of the future uncertainties might imply, define a “time-zero” event and work backward to create an early warning system. says Dr. Tade Olugubile, Covenant University, Ota, Ogun stat he explained that this was part of the issues Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia University. M Muneer and the co-founder of Medicine Institute Foundation for Diversity and Innovation raised recently.
“Let us create four quadrants for potential post-corona economic scenarios. The first dimension (X-Axis) shall be the current capitalistic “maximizing shareholder value/profits” on the left side and the new “maximizing shared value”, which is neo-socialism, or reimagined as “stakeholder capitalism” where suppliers, customers, workers and society flourish along with the business, on the right.
For the other dimension (Y-Axis), choose “prolonged global slowdown” on top and “bounced-back economy” on the bottom.
He explains that the next step is to create a short “story” about the future state each scenario represents.
Four scenarios emerge Maximising shareholder value:
1) With economic catastrophe, the result could be pervasive poverty and inequality, economic insecurity even for middle class, and political instability in many countries.
2) With economy bouncing back, rinse and repeat of the last many years — middle and lower classes continue to struggle, high levels of inequality remain.
3) When doom happens, there will be expanded social security programmes, greater taxation, or even some nationalisation of private wealth, and alliances between government and NGOs.
4) Economy bouncing back, things will return to the consensus on distribution of societal wealth, inequality narrows gradually and social goods made more affordable.
“Now come up with what we call a “time-zero” event for each of the four scenarios — in other words something that might be in media that represents either positive or negative signal of an inflection point. Once the “time-zero” events are established, work backward to identify information that would represent leading indicators of the event becoming a reality. If you see lots of indicators piling up, it is highly likely for the event to become reality”.
Dr. Adeshina on a thank you visit President Muhammadu Buhari at ASO ROCK Villa
Interestingly, we see weak signals that any of the four scenarios outlined above could be in our future. In fact, for all of them, we are able to find real, in-the-here-and-now headlines reflecting that scenario coming to fruition.
The question for all of us is whether we can create strategies that are robust in the face of all of these possibilities or whether we should bet on one.
Let us assume the time-zero event, “death of the soul of capitalism”, ensues in which case governments will have to turn tough on profiteering private enterprises for the sake of the larger working class, both local and migrants. Some indicators we might see are:
A rise in the popularity of authorities to take coordinated action
Pressure builds to eliminate easy access to stock buy-backs that lead to mass layoffs
Restrictions on executive compensation
Investors to take a hard look at cash reserves of firms
Minimum sustainable income plans
Increased health and social benefits to the labour class
While these aren’t predictions about what is likely to happen, it’s clear that we are in the midst of some kind of inflection point.
We’re going to be asking questions about many of our taken-for-granted assumptions: That globalisation and trade are always good; air travel should be accessible to everyone; we shouldn’t have to invest in building resilient systems, just efficient ones; nationals cannot do hard labour; and so on.
African Development Bank, under Akinwumi Adesina, needs to make Africa able crawl out of economic crisis created by COVID-19 fast. In this way, he will justify his re-election as head of the AfDB to serve Africa “with an acute sense of duty and commitment.”
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