Five Candidates Vie to Replace Adesina as AfDB President

By Adedapo Adesanya

In September 2025, Mr Akinwumi Adesina will bow out as the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), a position he has held since 2015 for over two terms of five years each.

The race to take over the reins of the African lender has heat up in the last few months.

Now, five candidates are running to take over from the Nigerian in an election scheduled to hold on Thursday, May 29, during the annual meeting in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

This election comes at a time that shrinking concessional funding, reduced aid from wealthy countries, and unstable borrowing costs have made the bank’s $318 billion capital more important than ever for Africa’s development.

So Who are the Candidates?

Business Post has gathered information via Reuters and other sources about the five candidates.

Swazi Tshabalala Bajabulile (South Africa) 

A banker with 30 years of experience, Tshabalala was, until October 2024, AfDB’s senior vice president.

The South African is the sole female candidate and she plans to transform the bank if she takes the helm.

Tshabalala said if delivered properly, infrastructure would allow Africa to tap its resources – from minerals to finance to trade. She wants to create innovative financial instruments, building on the AfDB’s foray into hybrid capital.

Amadou Hott (Senegal)

Senegal’s former economy minister has decades of banking experience from Lagos to London. He would focus the AfDB on African financial self-reliance by mobilising resources and designing projects to keep private money on the continent.

Hott said revenue collection must rise – the average tax to GDP ratio in Africa is 16 per cent, versus the OECD average of 34 per cent, which could boost credit ratings, lower borrowing costs and marshal money for pressing needs, including power and infrastructure.

Samuel Munzele Maimbo (Zambia)

A World Bank vice president on a leave of absence while campaigning, the Zambian has three decades of development finance experience.

As president, he would launch behind-the-scenes work to aggregate data, fix the financial plumbing and streamline regulations to enable Africa’s 54 nations to trade with and finance each other.

Maimbo, who has the backing of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (CMESA), wants a continent-wide approach to everything from debt sustainability to revenue collection and infrastructure.

Sidi Ould Tah (Mauritania)

Mauritania’s ex-finance minister and presidential adviser has run the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa for the past decade.

He is focused on four points: mobilising a broader scope of capital, reforming financial systems, harnessing demographics by formalising the informal sector that employs 83 per cent of Africans and building climate-resilient infrastructure. He believes the AfDB can turn every $1 raised into $10 of productive capital.

Abbas Mahamat Tolli (Chad)

Tolli has held top financial positions across Central Africa, including as Chad’s finance minister, regional central bank governor and president of the Development Bank of Central African States.

He focuses on self-sufficiency, from agriculture to finance, and wants to strengthen governance to cut inefficient, untransparent spending that has mired countries in debt without development.

He believes that Africa suffers a lot of financial outflows due to fiscal evasion or mismanagement of resources.

To make it work, Tolli envisions a “major overhaul” of the AfDB’s operational model by pooling risk, strengthening public-private partnerships and digitizing financing mechanisms.

Tolli said his own life, tending goats as a child after fleeing civil war aged 6,  mirrored Africa’s journey and gave him unique in sight into how to lift all those on the continent.