Corruption is not an African issue —AfDB President, Adesina

Dr. Akinwuni Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, has claimed that corruption is not an African problem.

This was disclosed by Adesina in a statement issued Saturday in Abuja and made available to the News Agency of Nigeria.

He asserted that what matters is to keep enhancing accountability, transparency, and the usage of public funds.

The statement reads, “The global financial crisis that brought the world down in 2008, 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.

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“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 Adesina, he discovered during his first visit to Eritrea that the country has a 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.

“I don’t want to minimise that Africa has a significant amount of illicit capital flows; it does anything between 80 billion and 100 billion 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,” Adesina further clarified.

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