Adesina pledges to focus on power, food, agric

FORMER Agriculture Minister and African Development Bank(AfDB) President -elect Dr. Akinwumi Adesina has stated his resolve to make power, food and agriculture his priorities in Africa.

Adesina stated this at the send forth party held in his honour by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development at Transcorp Hotel, Abuja.

The former minister stressed that Africa would become a global power house in food and agriculture, assuring that the continent would be green during his tenure.

Adesina also disclosed his readiness to build an Africa with shared prosperity, where peace and stability reigns.
According to him, “poverty cannot be a comparative advantage in Africa”, stressing that there would be a tremendous work in order to transform agriculture to be able to lead millions of people out of poverty.

According to him, “ poverty is not a natural endowment of Africa and we will work to make sure that we end poverty in Africa. We will particularly make sure we benefit a lot of women.”

Adesina stated that the bank would continue to work to accelerate growth and development of the continent and make sure that the growth is also equitable and to deal with the issue of inclusiveness of the growth process between countries and within the countries before his assumption to office by September.

The new ADB president said, his main agenda for Africa’s infrastructure is energy, saying “ the fact that Africa does not have energy is a huge gap. Africa must power herself.

“We are going to create a lot of jobs because as you know lots of our graduates need to come to the labour market. Obviously one of the priority I have for the bank is for it to work to create jobs, to build the skill, the entrepreneurship and the financing for Small Medium Enterprises(SMEs)

“ We are also going to work tremendously to reduce the level of fragility that we have on the continent. You can’t integrate fragile economy, you can only integrate resilient economy. So we are going to work quite a lot on that and also to help Africa to adapt to climate change, “ he added.

He explained that being elected as AfDB President should be seen as a call to serve and responsibility to lead Africa and therefore thanked the former President Goodluck Jonathan, President Muhammadu Buhari and Nigerians for their tremendous support towards his election.

Earlier in his welcome address, the ministry’s Permanent Secretary Sonny Echono, stated that the ceremony has provided an opportunity for development partners, stakeholders and clients of the ministry to thank the former minister for his tremendous achievements in the agricultural sector in Nigeria.