African Export-Import Bank

I would also like to salute the commitment of our member countries and the African Union policy organs, as well as all African financial institutions.

We have Afreximbank today with us, the African Development Bank, our partners, the United Nations, and also other institutions and partners present here today who have been supportive across the whole process for these past couple of years.

Your Excellency, this event is indeed a watershed moment in the economic history of our continent.

However, let us not forget that a rating agency will certainly not reduce significantly the cost of capital in the near future.

Thanks.

I hope that AU will take forward the issue of preferred creditor status that comes up so frequently in credit ratings of multilateral development banks such as Afreximbank, which lent to you, which was caught up in the restructuring.

Uh, I would like to know whether you will support and get African countries to support the recognition, uh, of de facto, uh, and de jure preferred creditor status for African development banks that are being threatened with downgrades because of the pressures from the IMF and others to create what they call plurilateral institutions with pre- preferred creditor status deleted.

That's very dangerous for the ratings of African countries, uh, and African financings because it has exactly the problem that you mentioned.

The new agency will help investors better assess Africa's investment risk by providing more information and context.

Executive Vice President of Afreximbank, one of the agency's backers, said African leaders have long accused Western rating agencies, including S&P, Moody's, and Fintech, of failing to fairly assess the risk of lending and also lending to African countries and of moving to downgrade them during crises such as conflict and pandemics.

The agencies reject that criticism, stating they apply for the same methodologies globally.

A twenty twenty-four Reuters investigation into Africa's debt crisis found no evidence of systemic bias in the sovereign rating assigned to the region by the three major global credit rating agencies.

And you are seeing tangible financial infrastructure being laid down to support it.

Nations like Barbados and the Bahamas have joined the African Export-Import Bank.

And didn't the source say they actually opened a branch there?

Yes.

And instead of us being constrained by our limited sizes, our small sizes, a country as small as Saint Kitts and Nevis with 38,000 population would access commodities at the same price as in Nigeria with 200 and something million.

And in that simple effort, as well as recognizing that Afreximbank would provide the financing, a relationship was rekindled.

And since then, the Afreximbank has opened its first regional office outside of Africa in Barbados.

Um, all of the CARICOM countries have joined.

They've put together an investment portfolio of about 4 billion US, which regrettably is more than anybody from the North Atlantic countries have done for us since the post-independence movement started.

The dollar sits in the middle of almost every transaction.

But now Afrexim Bank wants it out of the way.

So how does Afrexim Bank plan to pull that off? Through our trusty old Instapay, of all things.

The bank plans to connect its Pan-African payment and settlement system to Instapay, and six local banks have already applied to our central bank for approval.

The PAPSS system already runs across nearly 30 African countries, and that covers more than 200 financial institutions.

Let's start trading some of that paper.

And to begin with, maybe we need an Afrixim or a TDB to play market maker and create a liquidity pool for that board so that this paper can start trading and we can have some price discovery.

And these two gentlemen believe then the floodgates will open.

No, we're not saying the floodgates, but we're saying it's an important step.