Obafemi Awolowo Foundation to Honour AfDB President Today

By Enyi Ejike-Umunnabuike and Maryam Nwachukwu

Dr Akinwumi Ayode Adesina, the current President and Chairman of the Council of the 20-member Board of the African Development Bank (AfDB) is an urbane man of all seasons. He is an intellectually over-achieving personality, with a high affinity for creativity, uncommon value-addition, skilled corporate governance competencies, a rounded knowledge base, experience, brilliance and intelligence.

Before 2015, he was Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development.

During his period of development administrative stewardship, under President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s administration, Adesina left a highly enthralling scorecard as a political appointee of government, who was able the manage the positive gains of the electoral successes of that administration, achieving lots of feats, amidst very compelling and challenging circumstances.

Perhaps, the successes and lasting impressions that he left behind as Nigeria’s Minister provided a very unbiased career-premised evaluative template that found him worthy of selection and eventual endorsement as the most competent of all the candidates that vied for the exalted position.

This well-cultured, disciplined humble balanced personality will on March 6, 2024 (today), be honoured by the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation at the Lagos Continental Hotel with the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo Prize for Leadership.

As a tie-back to history, it will be recalled that the Obafemi Awolowo Prize for Leadership was first announced in December 2012, with the official award ceremony held on March 6, 2013.

Before Dr Adesina was announced as its fourth recipient, three other distinguished personalities had been conferred with the same award.

These include the Noble Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka; former South African President, Dr Thabo Mbeki; and the founder of the Afe Babalola University, Aare Afe Babalola.

A very significant aspect of this event is that it also coincides with the birth anniversary of the late foremost nationalist and statesman in whose memory the award was instituted.

The award is an initiative of the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation, set up in April 1992, to serve as the custodian of Chief Awolowo’s intellectual property and leadership legacy values and norms.

Established as an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organisation dedicated to immortalizing the democratic and development-oriented ideals of Awolowo, the organizers of the event, say the award is a “prestigious, biennial, international prize structured to follow a rigorous process of nomination and subsequent screening by a Selection Committee consisting of some of the most outstanding Nigerians”.

They further said that the prize serves as a strong motivational incentive for persons to pursue excellence in leadership and good governance. The award confers considerable honour and recognition to the recipient.

Speaking on the selection process which led to the choice of Adesina as the 2023 recipient, the foundation spokesperson Mrs Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu, said the call for nomination for the award was published for several months in 2023 and at the close of entries, many nominations of eminent persons were received, with Dr Adesina emerging as a unanimous candidate for the 2023 award.

Expressing his delight about the award and being in the company of previous eminent recipients, Dr Adesina, who has a Five Point Blueprint for repositioning the AfDB, said, “I am delighted to have been selected as a recipient of the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo Prize for Leadership.

“Joining Nobel Prize laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka and former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, as well as Aree Afe Babalola as prior winners of the prize is such a great honour,” he said.

Adesina, who simply describes himself as a ‘Kenyan, is the eighth elected President of the AfDB and the first Nigerian to be so elected to the position, having been elected on May 28, 2015, for the first time by the bank’s Board of Governors at its Annual Meetings held in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

He was re-elected for a second term in 2020 following an excellent performance acknowledged by supporters and critics alike.

The agenda of Adesina’s presidency at the AfDB with the ambition to Feed Africa, Light Up Africa, Industrialise Africa, Integrate Africa and Improve the Quality of Life in Africa, was particularly lauded by the organisers as capable of putting the development of the continent directly in the hands of its people.