African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank)

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Amidst our current national obsession with the musical chairs of appointments and the next major policy pronouncement by President Bola Tinubu, the Nigerian media paid scant attention to a major gathering of Africa’s business leaders in Ghana three weeks ago.

With few exceptions, Nigerian media titles confined themselves to regurgitating a press release distributed by APO, a media consultancy.

I am talking of the 30th Annual General Meetings of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), which held in Accra from June 18-21.

The 4-day meeting was significant because, in the last ten years, Afreximbank has taken pole position in the race to rewrite the African narrative.

In the beginning was Ghana

The choice of Ghana for this milestone anniversary celebration was not random. It was a homecoming of sorts.

By virtue of its first president, Kwame Nkrumah’s fanatical advocacy for political union among newly independent African states in the 1960s, the country earned its place as the engine room of Pan Africanism.

As a movement, African pride, social resilience and global competitiveness have always been at the heart of Pan Africanism.

Therefore, a well-rounded review of Afreximbank must incorporate the historical context of its emergence.

Ghana under Nkrumah was the spear’s tip of a creed whose preachers included individuals as diverse as Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian activist, Marcus Garvey, Jamaican-born pioneer of the Back to Africa Movement, WEB Du Bois, a Harvard University-trained sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist, George Padmore, Trinidadian writer and kindred ideologue to Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquais political philosopher and Walter Rodney, a Guyanese political activist.


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