Rethinking the Challenges of a Multilateral Development Bank in African Society: The African Development Bank in Nigeria, 1986-2015

Abstract

Multilateral development banks as international donor institutions, oftentimes, are wholly blamed for the failures they encounter in their operational activities in African society. Many scholars have harped on the bourgeois development approach of such banks to fault everything about their operation in Africa. However, a cursory look at the problems that confronted those multilateral development institutions in some African societies tended to present a different scenario. This paper, therefore, examines the challenges of the African Development Bank as one of the international donor-development institutions in Nigeria. Methodology wise, it adopted the qualitative method of research but, as a study in economic history, relevant data were presented and analysed. The writer drew his sources of information mainly from oral respondents, official policy documents and reports. Also, books, newspapers and magazines served as sources. The paper having adopted the structural functionalist theory as the relevant frame of analysis argues that not all the blame for failures about the Bank operation in Nigeria did originate from the Bank: both Nigeria as a recipient and the Bank as a donor share in the responsibility for the performance or failures that the Bank had recorded in the country. The paper found that contrary to the common belief that the African Development Bank is wholly responsible for the problems that confronted it in Nigeria most of those problematic challenges are inherent symptoms of a dysfunctional structure of the Nigerian society. It concludes that the Bank has not been able to realise its developmental targets in Nigeria not because of its bourgeois approach to development but, largely, because the country’s body-politic had been defectively structured in a way that often impedes development. It, thus, enjoins Nigerians not to wholly blame international institutions and donor agencies for all the development failures; hence, it recommends a workable framework and attitudinal reorientation for Nigeria to rid off its structural disabilities and understand her role in the spectrum of development agenda in a globalising world.