President and Chairman of the board of African Export Import Bank (Afreximbank), Professor Benedict Oramah has said that the total assets of the bank will reach $60 billion in less than six years. Oramah made the projection on Monday in his opening speech at the on-going 30th annual meetings of the bank in Accra, Ghana. Oramah said his projection is based on the fact that the bank now has many subsidiaries offering services from project preparation to market access services, and operating in the larger continent of Afri-Caribbean. He revealed that it took the bank 30 years to achieve $30 billion total assets
Oramah said that the Afreximbank was delivering on the blueprint laid out by the pioneers of the OAU for Africa’s socio-economic transformation. The pioneers had set priority key goals to establish a free trade area among the various African countries; to establish a Pan-African Payments and Clearing Union; to establish a common external tariff to protect the emergent industries and set up a raw material price stabilisation fund; to develop trade among African countries by the organisation and participation in African trade fairs and exhibitions and by granting transport and transit facilities; and to progressively free national currencies from all non-technical external attachments and the establishment of a Pan-African monetary Zone, he said.
“For sixty years, this well-articulated road map remained a map and gathered dust,” said President Oramah. “But thanks to the vision of African leaders who founded Afreximbank 30 years ago, one by one, they are being delivered within the framework of ‘Team Africa’, comprising the African Union and its Agencies, the AfCFTA Secretariat and Afreximbank as the underpinning banker”.
“Today, the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) is up and running, which will save the continent $5 billion in intra-African transfer changes. It will also expedite and enable payments for intra-African trade in African currencies,” he said.“Very soon, we will domesticate all intra-African payments and extend the same to the CARICOM, where just a few days ago, the Association of CARICOM Central Banks adopted PAPSS as their preferred payment infrastructure for a pilot project. By this singular move, we are one step closer to a full integration of African and CARICOM economies”.
He added that, in response to the founding fathers’ aspiration to develop trade among African States by organising and participating in African trade fairs, Afreximbank, in 2018, worked in partnership with the African Union to introduce biennial Intra-African Trade Fairs (IATF). Afreximbank pre-funded the organisation of the trade fairs, of which two had been held in Cairo and Durban, South Africa, attracting an aggregate of about 40,000 visitors and about 75 billion US dollars in deals.
With the AfCFTA Secretariat joining the partnership following its establishment, the IATF, branded the AfCFTA Marketplace, had become the largest gathering of African businesses and traders, he continued. The thirdedition would hold in Cairo from 9 to 15 November 2023.
It was also because Africa had Afreximbank that an integrated regional transit guarantee scheme for the continent had been birthed to ease the movement of goods across the 110 borders that divide Africa, said Prof.Oramah. Under the Scheme, goods could move across multiple African borders under one transit bond, significantly reducing border delays and transit costs.
Prof.Oramah also noted that the signing of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) in 2018, and its entry into force a year later, fulfilled another key aspiration of the continent’s founding leaders, saying that to make that Agreement work for Africa, a financial backbone was necessary. “Afreximbank’s existence will give the AfCFTA the best chance of success”.
He announced that, to deal with the considerable intra-African trade finance gap, Afreximbank disbursed over $20 billion in the five years to 2021 and projected to double those disbursements to $40 billion in the five years to 2026. He added that it was Afreximbank: that arranged the $2.9 billion bundle of credit and guarantees that made it possible for Egyptian contractors to begin executing the largest intra-African construction contract for a dam in Tanzania; that supported, phosphate fertiliser imports from Morocco to Nigeria and Ethiopia with hundreds of millions of US dollars; and that enabled Vista Bank, Burkina Faso, to complete the acquisition of some BNP subsidiaries in West Africa.
Afreximbank and the AfCFTA Secretariat had also established the AfCFTA Adjustment Fund to, among others, compensate eligible countries for tariff revenue losses arising from the new trade regime while also supporting the private sector to adjust in an orderly manner to the new arrangement under the AfCFTA, he continued.
Oramah added that Afreximbank was working with the African Regional Standards Organization to harmonise trade standards across Africa and had used Afreximbankmobilised grant funding to harmonise over 155 standards covering priority areas of automobile, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. He also said that the bank was working with Bureau Veritas of France to build testing, inspection, and certification centres across Africa under the branded Africa Quality Assurance Centres.