New Ivorian president Alassane Dramane Ouattara and Donald Kaberuka, the head of the African Development Bank (AfDB), have discussed the bank’s return to Abidjan as soon as possible after its eight-year exile in Tunis, it emerged yesterday.
AfDB’s president told Emerging Markets he was pushing for an accelerated process that could take less time than the two to three years that observers had expected.
Kaberuka said a return was “imminent”, with the issue to be discussed by ADB governors tomorrow [Thursday]. He said that “sooner or later we shall return to Cote d’Ivoire,” but the move should not be made in haste.
“We will look at the objective conditions but Cote d’Ivoire is a challenge we must meet,” he said. “Ouattara is a chance for Cote d’Ivoire and we should do everything we can to support him.”
Ouattara, a former IMF official, has strong international support. “I am very happy with the outcome of events in Cote d’Ivoire. I think it’s going for themselves, for West Africa and for Africa as a whole,” Kaberuka said.
The AfDB’s board of executive directors on Friday approved a $150 million financial support package to help restore basic social and administrative services. The funding agreement is expected to be signed later today.
Plans for an eventual return were under way before the November 2010 presidential election, when Ouattara beat Laurent Gbagbo only for the incumbent to refuse to give up office until he was ousted by force in April.
“The headquarters in Abidjan needs rehabilitation,” Kaberuka told Emerging Markets. “We had started work in the headquarters building in Plateau [neighbourhood] but this was interrupted by the fighting.”
Analysts say it has been AfDB presidents’ duty to say they would go back to Abidjan from the moment the bank said it was leaving. But Kaberuka said things were different now. “I spoke at length to Ouattara at his 21 May inauguration and we agreed we needed to do something.”
Quizzed on the two years it might take to arrange a return after the AfDB board had reached its decision, Kaberuka replied: “Of course it needs the ‘orderly return’ decided in our statutes, first obtaining the decision and then allowing another year to make sure the situation is right.”
However, after a meeting of G8 ministers in Washington and Ouattara’s inauguration it was widely agreed that something should be done and the ADB has an important role to play.
Kaberuka said: “The ADB is the only significant institution that has kept its headquarters in Cote d’Ivoire having left eight years ago, and then continued its operation – growing its operations – in a temporary home that then had a revolution.”
In April, the AfDB Governors’ Consultative Committee meeting in Washington “acknowledged that the Ivorian authorities were making all efforts to stabilise and improve the security situation and merited support from the international community.” However, a Bank statement said, the committee “noted, nonetheless, that the process of fully re-establishing security would likely take a while before things fully returned to normal.”
Since relocating to Tunis in 2003, the Bank has reviewed the security situation in Abidjan on a yearly basis, but the April meeting recommended this should be done three times a year, and “the decision of a triennial review could be revisited at any time if the situation at Headquarters improved faster”.