APRM and central banks in Africa promoting devt

The notion of ‘’Generation of Africa’s leaders’’ is likely to point at politicians; civil servants; businessmen and business women (excluding market women who operate in the informal sector of economies); academia, professionals, clerics and the media. Those who manage central banks assume an aura of secretive actors dressed with a hallo of ‘’sovereignty of a […]

The notion of ‘’Generation of Africa’s leaders’’ is likely to point at politicians; civil servants; businessmen and business women (excluding market women who operate in the informal sector of economies); academia, professionals, clerics and the media. Those who manage central banks assume an aura of secretive actors dressed with a hallo of ‘’sovereignty of a country’’ under cover of wise silence and aloofness. While politicians are expected to relate openly with an urban mechanic and rural crop-grower, central bank operatives hide behind a shrine that hides a nation’s currency.
Nigeria’s Central Bank Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi initiated a loan scheme for farmers. It, however, had commercial bankers as intermediaries – a breed of money makers whose colonial roots quarantined them from direct contact with ‘’the great unwashed’’ peasant farmers and market women.  Commercial banks effectively blocked the vast sums of money allocated for animating small-scale farming from reaching that constituency.
This matter of the role that central banks should play in Africa’s development has escaped public scrutiny and discourse. Idi Amin had Uganda’s Central Bank Governor for running into the street and smashing the official photograph of deposed President Apollo Obote; thereby broadcasting the volatility of his loyalty to authority. Lamido Sanusi incited explosive criticism by legislators wounded by his revelation of their huge income. The silence about central bank management is traceable to the colonial practice of banks not giving loans to African entrepreneurs; thereby crippling the development of capitalism in Africa. Post-colonial bankers have not been pressured by politicians to take economic development to the masses. Foreign banks have, often, been more creative by borrowing local inventions like ‘’esusu’’ from under their noses.
In the 1980s, central banks watched as the IMF/World Bank invaded Africa with what Adebayo Adedeji called ‘’economic and social warfare’’ marketed as redemptive ‘’Structural Adjustment Programmes’’ (SAP). By 2011, SAP had bred massive unemployment and millions of youths whose education was wrecked by impoverishment of teachers and learning facilities
In Nigeria, Dr Ahmed Modibbo Mohammed at the Universal Basic Education gave television interviews in 2010 denouncing State governments that had left huge sums of money allocated for supporting high quality standards in Junior and Senior Secondary schools to lie dormant inside vaults of the Central Bank. Borno and Yobe States were prime offenders. Political, religious, and professional associations remained silent. The Central Bank did not declare it a form of economic sabotage and investment in national insecurity. By the time Boko Haram struck from their incubation in Borno and Yobe States, all were guilty.
In Kenya, huge slums in Nairobi became celebrities for United Nations officials posing as redeemers to victims of urban poverty. Losers from unjust redistribution of land originally seized by European farmers had surged into urban slums. From them, politicians armed the ‘’Mungiki’’ as militia to help rig elections. They were hired as combat troops in the post-2007 elections violence. There was no evidence that Kenya’s Central Bank evolved initiatives to take development to curb festering urban anger which earned Nairobi the nickname of ‘’Nairobbery’’ – as a salute to incessant self-help initiatives by armed robbers.
Phillip Ndegwa, a former Governor of Kenya’s Central Bank has blamed banking rules which prevent African countries from printing money for development. Money held by the central bank must be deposited as ‘’foreign reserves’’: available for lending to Euro-American businesses.
Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda have initiated selling Government bonds to citizens with small cash savings to enable them participate in pooling capital as well as sharing in dividends paid to shareholders. The adoption of this measure by all African countries may raise the $ 29 billion which Donald Kaberuka, outgoing president of the African Development Bank, said the bank needed annually for building infrastructure in Africa.
 Uhuru Kenyatta as Chairman of APRM Forum must arouse Africa’s NGOs to push central bankers to embrace Africa’s development by pouring funds into animating productivity – including industrialisation – by Africa’s 1.6 billion populations by 2020. APRM must inject into development the $ 1 trillion held as pension funds; and $50 billion stolen from Africa by corrupt foreign businesses.