Dr Akinwumi Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank, AfDB, has stated that corruption is not an issue peculiar to just Africa.
Adesina, who made this known in an interview with the UK Guardian, revealed that corruption is high in the financial and economic sectors in Europe, while places like Eritrea in East Africa have zero per cent corruption.
“The global financial crisis that brought the world down in 2008, was not in Africa. We have no Wall Street. That collapse came from greed, from corruption, from fraud.
“You have people cooking the books that are in the financial industry in Europe, not in Africa. Corruption is not an African issue.
“The issue is, that is not to say that there’s none. What you have to do is to continue to improve transparency, and accountability in the use of public resources.
“During my first visit to Eritrea, I was talking to UN Development Programme staff. You know what they told me? That, in Eritrea, corruption is zero percent.
“Why do we not talk about that? That’s the kind of thing that we want to do. For us as a development bank, we take good governance very seriously.”
