By Umaru Fofana
On the 1 September 2015 Africa’s premier financial institution will have a new man at the helm. 55-year-old Akinwumi Adesina will assume office after his election in May. It is a tall order to succeed Donald Kaberuka whose 10-year leadership has been lauded by all - including world and African leaders.
The election of Nigeria’s agriculture minister by finance ministers (known as Governors) of member states of the African Development Bank (AfDB) may not have come as a complete surprise - after all the country narrowly lost out the last time around despite having almost 10% of the bank’s shares and votes. This does not take away the brilliance of the agro-economist who won in the fifth round of voting. After all he and finance minister Nkonjo Ewella have been praised as two of the most efficient ministers in President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet.
Inside the palatial Hotel Ivoire in the Ivory Coast where the AfDB was holding its 50th Annual General Meeting and election, a thick cloud amounting to a figurative smog was gathering against Sierra Leone. Much to our ignominy our candidate did not just lose, he was trounced. Of the eight candidates, Sierra Leone’s foreign minister, Dr Samoura Kamara was the first to be eliminated in the first of what would be five ballots. Our bid to lead the AfDB turned out to be a damp squib - and there has been no investigation, internal or otherwise, by government to find out what really went wrong if only to avoid a future defeat. Perhaps if there had been a probe into why Dr Abdulai O Conteh failed in his bid to head the African Union in 2008 this humiliation would have been avoided. Like with Dr Conteh the defeat of Dr Samoura was not for want of a good candidate - rather due to the lack of a good sell.
In sharp contrast to the buoyancy and confidence written on his face at the Radisson Mammy Yoko Hotel in Freetown last year as he parleyed with Donald Kaberuka, the outgoing head of the AfDB, even the 18-degree fully air-conditioned-temperature corridors in the Abidjan hotel could not keep at bay the beads or icicles of perspiration on the face of Dr Samoura Kamara. Not only on him, but also on me and on members of his official delegation some of whom you’d wonder what they had actually gone to do there at the expense of the Sierra Leonean tax payer. They were made up of mainly the bizarre and the ridiculous - from officials of the ports authority to the road maintenance fund, and even the wife of a former minister. I repeat, all at the expense of the expense of the poor Sierra Leonean tax payer.
On the flight you got the feeling they all had a voting right at the AfDB election. And they were led as chef de mission by Mohamed Bangura of the United Democratic Movement (UDM) even if he hardly represents anyone in Sierra Leone but himself, and they flew mostly - probably entirely - business class. Funny albeit serious.
At the height of the Ebola outbreak here last year, when Dr Kaberuka visited to pledge his and the Bank’s support to helping Sierra Leone, foreign minister Samoura Kamara as if he had just been elected to succeed the Rwandan as president of the bank, looked expressly jubilant. Who would not be confident with such an impressive CV. On paper, Dr Samoura Kamara was the best qualified of all eight candidates: He has worked as a senior official at a Bretton Wood institution, he was the country’s financial secretary, finance minister, etc. He has been involved throughout the country’s post-war recovery under both the former and the current administrations. In fact I dare say he is the most qualified economist to serve as finance minister since Dr Jim Forna.
Add to all that the fact that he is foreign minister. To be president of the AfDB requires a blend of sagacity in economics and an experience in diplomacy. As the country’s foremost economist and its top diplomat what else could we have asked for in our candidate? Yes, nothing else but one question. I know he does not have the charisma expected of a diplomat but that is not the one issue. That one issue is this: How much did we market Dr Kamara?
The AfDB comprises Governors who are finance ministers of the member countries. In Abidjan our finance minister was nowhere to be seen, truly and even pretentiously campaigning for or promoting in anyway whatsoever our country’s candidate and his predecessor. At some point I wondered what interest Liberia’s finance minister had in our candidate. As a journalist - and a foreign one at that - I had access to many of the rooms where backroom dealings were happening. Amara Mohamed Konneh campaigned as if he was finance minister of Sierra Leone and not Liberia. He campaigned for Sierra Leone’s candidate far more than Sierra Leone’s own finance minister did.
There were no permutations made by the Sierra Leone delegation. For example in an elimination contest you would expect that the country’s team would have strategised on what to do should their candidate cross the first round - who to lobby and with what. The horse-trading, if you like. many of them were either clueless about what was happening - and you wonder why they were there - or they did not give a hoot. Either is bad. Both is criminal and unpatriotic.
Very few among them were engaged by the government on what to do to make our candidate electable. The candidacy of Dr Samoura was the candidacy of Sierra Leone and not of himself. If you wink at that then you have no idea how a Kaberuka presidency of the bank has benefitted his native Rwanda. Even a man who hardly says or sees anything good about the current government as an opposition big-hitter endorsed his candidacy. Julius Maada Bio, a military leader who had first appointed Dr Samoura as finance minister in 1996, threw his weight behind his candidacy despite all the disagreements he has with government. That was when - or even preceding that - the government should have set up a bipartisan team to market the candidate. There were finance ministers in Sierra Leone before Ernest Koroma became president. So were there foreign ministers. They have friends outside our shores. Some of them would have used their old friendships to get us some votes to have at the very least saved us from such disgraceful defeat. That is what I read was done in the cases of Jaloul Ayed of Tunisia, Birama Boubacar Sidibé of Mali and even the eventual winner from Nigeria. To the extent that the moment he was elected president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari endorsed Akinwumi Adesina’s candidacy of the AfDB.
And if you think Nigeria’s great showing was because of its size and the size of its shares and votes, think again. Cristina Duarte of Cabo Verde - a country with less than one million people - made it to the last three. Even our neighbours, Guinea went with the Mali candidate. We had no buy-in from the francophone group, none from the anglophones save for Liberia, none from our bilateral ties with western countries which have a vote in the AfDB election. There are 54 regional member countries and 26 non-regional ones. None of those non regional ones gave us their vote. So apparently Liberia and Sierra Leone voted for Dr Kamara.
I understand President Koroma made some whistle stops in some capitals. But they were too few and they were too close to the election with these capitals having already pitted tents with one candidate or another.
There was virtually no PR or media team set up to help market Dr Samoura - not even the State House communications unit or even the ministry of information. they were completely out of their depth and either had no idea what to do or were not enabled to do so. Even the local media got involved literally on the eve of voting.
Dr Samoura may find it hard to continue as foreign minister and I would not be surprised if he stepped down soon. That in large part may be due to his loss of morale but it will cost Sierra Leone more than it will cost him. His is an institutional memory that should be made the best use of. And the world is waiting to tap from his reservoir of knowledge. Unless he decides to run for president, the country has lost him simply because his government failed to market him (properly).
(C) Politico 19/08/15
