Funding for projects in Nigeria and other African countries is expected to increase as the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) plans to double its total assets to $60 billion in less than six years.
This comes after it took the Bank 30 years to reach $30 billion in total assets and guarantee.
President and chairman of the Board of Afreximbank, Benedict Oramah, disclosed this at the ongoing 30th annual meeting of the bank with the theme, ‘Delivering the Vision, Building Prosperity for Africans’, the first gathering of global Africa, in Accra, Ghana.
He said the Bank has remained financially strong, and that in the past 30 years, it has disbursed over $100 billion.
“Every African must be proud that a seed sown 30 years ago with less than $150 million in total assets and almost an equal amount of equity has blossomed into an institution with about $32 billion in total assets and guarantees and about $6 billion in shareholders’ funds,” he said.
An institution that posted just about $12 million in total revenues in 1995 returned over $1.5 billion in revenues in 2022. “These results are indicative of opportunities in Africa; they prove without doubt that development work can be done profitably. Again, they validate the assumptions of the founding fathers of the Bank 30 years ago,” Oramah said.
He expressed confidence that in the next 30 years, the Bank will have “birthed many off-springs, offering services from project preparation to market access services, operating in our new larger continent of Afri-Caribbean.”
Oramah appreciated the vision of the African leaders who founded Afreximbank 30 years ago, saying one by one, they are being delivered within the framework of “Team Africa”, comprising the African Union and its agencies, the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) Secretariat and Afreximbank as the underpinning banker.
The Afreximbank chief executive further stated that, at the moment, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is up and running, which will save the continent $5 billion in intra-African transfer changes, and also expedite and enable payments for intra-African trade in African currencies.
According to him, it is now possible for a Gambian to buy Nigerian urea fertilisers using Gambian Dalasi to purchase Naira; for a young Ghanaian to pay for holidays in Seychelles in Ghanaian Cedi, and for a small farmer in rural Zambia to stream her favourite Nollywood movie paying in Zambian Kwacha.
Speaking earlier, Ghanaian president, Nana Addo Dankwo Akufo-Addo, said Afrieximbank, under its countercyclical response mechanism, provided a timely support to help Ghana navigate the macroeconomic management challenges worsened by Russia’s aggression of Ukraine in an orderly manner when suddenly the country realised it was alone.
He attributed Ghana’s difficult economic challenges partly to its downgrading by the various rating agencies.
Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Ernest Yedu Addison, delivering his welcome remarks, said that Ghana represented the most appropriate venue for the celebration of Afreximbank’s 30th anniversary, given the Bank’s role in developing and promoting African trade and the fact that Ghana was the home of the AfCFTA Secretariat.
Addison said that Afreximbank had been very supportive of Ghana and had, over the years, provided more than $2 billion to support the Ghanaian economy.
In his contribution, secretary-general of the AfCFTA Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, said that with the inclusion of a vision for an integrated African market in the founding treaty of the OAU, the founding fathers of the AU had foreseen the need for Afreximbank.
That vision had been grounded in the objective of the integration of African trade finance, he noted.
Describing Afreximbank and the AfCFTA as twins born 30 years apart, Mene noted that if trade barriers were eliminated but there was no trade finance, all the efforts would come to nothing. At the same time, if trade finance was available but trade barriers persisted and prevented trade, then all the efforts would still have been wasted.
