The BOMA African Union AfroChampions Event In Washington, DC

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VIRTUAL REMARKS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, IMMEDIATE PAST VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA AT THE BOMA AFRICAN UNION AFROCHAMPIONS EVENT IN WASHINGTON DC ON THE 23^RD OF OCTOBER, 2024

PROTOCOLS

Excellencies, distinguished participants of the BOMA, friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, the BOMA is the flagship Africa Union AfroChampions event created at the behest of the Assembly of Heads of State to commemorate African integration every year.

At its inception, it focused on the African setting as per its mandate, however, as the years have gone by, it has become clear that Africa’s situation is inevitably linked with the current world order.

Consequently, the BOMA had to spread its wings, a few weeks ago, it was alighted in New York in the midst of the proceedings of the UN General Assembly meeting, and today we are convening again this time on the sidelines of the World Bank IMF Annual Meetings in Washington DC.

I believe that I speak on behalf of our Continental leaders when I say that we’re proud to see the Africa Union Commission, AfroChampions, the Continental private sector and other key Pan-African stakeholders take our edict to create the BOMA and transform it into a powerful rallying cry for all those who wish the continent well. To mobilize behind clear, lucid, tangible and powerful programs to advance the mission of transformation that we have set for ourselves when we launched agenda 2063.

When I last addressed the BOMA, I highlighted what a critical juncture we were at in the journey toward an Africa at peace at home and abroad, an Africa confident of its place on the world stage and perhaps above all, able to deliver prosperity and dignity to all its citizens.

As we embark on the second decade of Agenda 2063’s implementation, the question of what we are going to do as a continent to redesign the global architecture of development finance from our continental standpoint is largely upon every strategy we construct. It does not matter whether the issue at hand is about health, energy, the environment, peace and stability, or agriculture and food security, finance is our chief constraint and our critical lever to move from perennial planning to emphatic execution.

Over the years, we have sought to make the challenge one of getting an equal seat at the table until we learned that the table itself was not always in the right room and that when it was, the seats were musical chairs to be rearranged without effective notice.

It is not enough to confine our quest for a new global development finance architecture to the push for an equal seat at the table anymore. Now is the time for us to ask more fundamental questions about what truly transformative development finance would look like in our context and move straight on to creating our own unique mechanisms for enriching the scope of what can be financed so that we are not tossed about by fashionable whims and the whims of global monopoly capital.

In addition to rewriting the institutional DNA of global development finance by promoting the emergence of new structures, the African Union Assembly of Heads of State has enthusiastically supported the growth and agency of Africa’s own development finance institutions, and we will continue to work assiduously with our RACs and Africa Union counterparts to ensure that our private capital allocators become better aware of the opportunity of investing in these continental institutions and of the importance of contributing to the growth of regional capital markets as a joint and cohesive strategy of asserting Africa’s distinct developmental interests.

I therefore relish the focus of this year’s BOMA on “Reimagining Development Finance in Africa” and I wholeheartedly endorse the thesis that today the smart money is indeed on Africa.

Study after study has revealed that returns from investing in African infrastructure are considerably higher than the global average. To cite just one example, given the scarcity of capital on the continent, this fact can only mean that it is only the perceptive investors, able to look beyond the myopic and frankly sometimes biased risk ratings, and other perception premiums, and delve by themselves into the rich underbelly of stylized facts that are reaping all these financial harvests in Africa.

We could keep these goodies to ourselves but this is a generous continent, we’ve always believed that a good feast is better enjoyed together and we’re warmly inviting investors worldwide to partner with institutions, financiers and entrepreneurs, to explore the largest untapped financial opportunities in the world.

I thank the African Union Commission, AfroChampions, the AFCTA Secretariat, the AUDA Nepard, Stanford University, the Hoover Institution and the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions for their warm invitation to address this August Gathering.

I hope that before the next BOMA many of the great ideas that will come out of your collective brainstorming will have already started having an impact so that in the best traditions of the Africa Union and the BOMA, we will have many ladders to stand on as we reach for the lofty heights of agenda 2063.

Thank you all very much for listening.