16 June 2015, Abuja – The Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, has called on the newly-elected President, African Development Bank, AfDB, Mr. Akinwunmi Adesina, to focus on entrenching transparency in the management and utilisation of revenues from natural resources in Nigeria and other African countries.
In a statement in Abuja, Executive Secretary of NEITI, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, lamented the fact that over the years the AfDB had not done enough on governance challenges facing resource-rich nations in Africa. She, therefore, urged Adesina to re-direct the attention of the organisation to focus more on natural resource governance issues, using the NEITI global framework.
She said: “Poor management of oil, gas and mining revenues is responsible for mass poverty in resource rich AfDB member countries in Africa.
The AfDB at this time needs to pay greater attention to implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, EITI, in resource –rich member countries like Nigeria, through deliberate policy to provide support to remediation, civil society and human capacity development.
“NEITI looks forward to working closely with the AfDB in Nigeria in many areas including expanding the EITI implementation to aid national development, and poverty reduction.” Ahmed described the election of Adesina as timely and an opportunity for a new chapter to commence in the affairs of the regional organisation.
She also urged him to take urgent steps to liberalise the development programmes of AfDB, in order to attract larger participation of member countries in terms of access to information, policies and plans of the organisation. She noted that at the moment, most member states have limited knowledge of the AfDB programmes and how these programmes can be accessed to address peculiar development challenges in many areas of governance facing the continent.
“At the centre of these problems which the AfDB needs to pay greater attention to is increasing rate of poverty, resource wars and conflicts,” she added.
– Vanguard