PREVIEW
With access to Gulf funding, Mauritania’s Sidi Ould Tah may win more backing from worried shareholders
The US Trump administration plans to slash US$555 million in support for the African Development Bank’s (AfDB) soft-loan affiliate will leave a hefty funding gap for the new president to be elected at its annual meeting in Abidjan on 29 May (AC Vol 66 No 4, Pan-Africanism is on the ballot).
Washington says the African Development Fund for the continent’s least-developed countries was ‘not currently aligned to administration priorities’.
‘The decision is significant and it has a huge impact on Africa’s development,’ said Samuel Maimbo, a World Bank Vice-President and Zambia’s candidate to succeed outgoing AfDB chief Akinwumi Adesina.
Insiders say the campaign of Maimbo, the official candidate of the Southern African Development Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, had been gaining ground in recent weeks (Dispatches 8/10/24, Why is South Africa challenging Zambia’s bid for the AfDB Presidency?). He has spent much of his career in Washington with the World Bank but the US announcement of the AfDF funding block and its scepticism about multilateral banks could weaken Maimbo’s arguments.
Funding cuts from the United States and other western economies could favour Sidi Ould Tah of Mauritania, the Director-General of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA), as best positioned to tap Islamic banks and Gulf states. During his ten-year tenure at BADEA, Tah presided over a 75% increase in its assets.
Adesina has spent much of his final year arguing that the bank must ramp up its private sector lending, thereby taking on more risk. Yet that is unlikely to help Africa’s poorest states who often struggle to develop bankable projects (AC Vol 65 No 12, Adesina urges the bank to go private).
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