Sidi Ould Tah elected to succeed Adesina as African Development Bank President

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Indications emerging out of the Annual General Meeting and meeting of the Board of Governors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, suggest that Sidi Ould Tah of Mauritania has been elected as the ninth president of the bank, to succeed Akinwunmi Adesina, whose second tenure at AfDB ends in September, after 10 years at the helm.

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A key analyst and follower of the candidates and electoral processes, who prefers to remain anonymous at this point, describes the third round of the voting that signals Mr Tah’s win as being, “73 per cent regional and 77 per cent total.” The source said this has “Never happened before in history for such a majority. It’s a double mandate.”

This means that Mr Tah not only won 77 per cent of the total votes but was equally endorsed by 73 per cent of the voting delegates from the African region to secure both a regional and international mandate, which is unprecedented in the history of the AfDB presidential endorsement.

According to the results of the third round of the voting available to PREMIUM TIMES, of the three top finalists for the top job, Amadou Hott of Senegal had 3.55 per cent of the total votes, Samuel Maimbo of Zambia had 20.26 per cent of the votes and Sidi Tah had 76.18 per cent of the votes to emerge as the president-elect of the Bank. The other two earlier shortlisted candidates, Bajabulile Tshabalala of South Africa and Abbas Tolli of Chad, seemed to have lost out in the race to yield to the three finalists.

Mr Tah, who will assume office in September, was until recently the director general of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA), which he ran for a decade from 2015. Prior to then, he was the Mauritanian Minister for Finance and Economy. He worked for about 35 years in international finance and held senior roles in multilateral institutions. He was an expert at the Mauritanian Bank for Development and Commerce (BMDC) from 1984 to 1986, a financial analyst at the Food Security Commission in 1986, and an Investment Promotion Officer, and later the Technical Assistant to the President of the Islamic Development Bank between 1999 and 2006.

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Mr Tah has a PhD in Economics from Nice-Sophia-Antipolis University and a DEA (Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies) also in Economics from Paris VII University France. He has attended executive programmes in Financial Engineering, Asset Management and Leadership at the Harvard Institute for International Development, the London Business School and Swiss Finance Institute.