U.S. pioneer AfDB director, Doley backs Adesina for second term

•Call American representatives to order, HURIWA tells President Trump
•Vows to approach UN over Buhari’s non-constitution of NHRC board

The United States (US) pioneer Executive Director on the Board of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Harold E. Doley, had expressed support for Dr. Akinwumi Adesina as president of the bank for a second term in August this year.

In a letter addressed to the current U.S. representative on the AfDB Board and Secretary to the U.S. Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, a copy of which was sent to the AfDB Board Chairman and sighted by The Guardian yesterday, he said Adesina was a good man and had performed since assuming office in 2015.

Doley also declared that the AfDB’s success was America’s success, hence the need for U.S. to support Adesina’s second term to enable him to complete the noble programmes he started in the first term aimed at drastically reducing poverty in Africa.

He also said there was no need for a second investigation of the whistleblower allegations since the Board had already cleared him in line with the established conventions.

But the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has said it has resolved to petition President Donald Trump to call his Treasury Secretary at the AfDB, Stephen Dowd, to order to end alleged attempt to destabilise funding of Africa, saying civil society organisations in Nigeria had passed a vote of confidence on Adesina.

HURIWA, therefore, objected to Dowd’s insistence that external examiners should investigate Adesina when the bank’s ethics committee headed by a Japanese had already exonerated him (Adesina), who is the sole candidate for the presidency of the Bank for another term of five years.

In a statement issued in Abuja, its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko and National Media Affairs Director, Zainab Yusuf, reminded President Trump that as President of the United States, he had to subject himself to scrutiny in the Congress dominated by democrats in the House successfully impeached him.

The group argued that if external panel of independent investigators were not constituted to try President Trump, how come Dowd, who is determined to scuttle the growth and advancement of the African Development Bank be insisting that Adesina, who was subjected to all the internal investigative mechanisms of the institution but was democratically declared innocent be again subjected to another round of investigations by outsiders as against the established traditions of the AfDB? This will be tantamount to double jeopardy if allowed.

Meanwhile, HURIWA threatened to mobilise the Nigerian civil rights community to approach the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to downgrade the Nigerian Human Rights Commission (NHRC) if in the next 78 working hours President Muhammadu Buhari failed to reconstitute the NHRC’s governing board which last had a council in 2015.

“HURIWA wishes to refresh Mr. President’s memory that human rights groups and individuals made efforts before the previous session of the National Assembly granted the necessary reforms that have guaranteed the internationally required operational and funding autonomy of the Rights Commission.

“This happened in 2010 as we restate that stakeholders with collaboration of the National Assembly and civil society successfully advocated passage of the NHRC Amendment Act 2010, which among other things empowered the commission to compel investigation of human rights violations and register its decisions with the high court as equivalent to decisions of the high court and enforceable as such,” it stated.