How AfDB will choose its next leader

The nomination process for the next president of the African Development Bank officially opened on Tuesday, although official candidates won't be announced until February 2015. But while we wait for that list, it's interesting to take a look at the process of how AfDB chooses its president at a crucial time for the institution, which is preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary and move back to its old headquarters in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, after a decade in Tunis, Tunisia. In case of AfDB, it's not as predictable as the Asian Development Bank or the World Bank, where the leader has always come from Japan and the United States, respectively. AfDB does require the president to be an African, but the nationality and ethnicity of the chief executive has been varied. The institution's first elected president was Mamoun Beheiry, an Arab from Sudan. And while Nigeria has for so long been the bank's top shareholder, and therefore has the highest voting power of 9.26 percent, AfDB has never had a Nigerian president. In 2005, Nigerian candidate Olabisi Ogunjobi lost against Donald Kaberuka from Rwanda, which back then had 0.16 percent voting powers at the bank. History The rules surrounding the choosing of the bank's next president today has in part been shaped by its history. When AfDB was founded in 1964, bank presidents were chosen by regional members alone. But in 1977 and facing dwindling resources largely attributed to inflation, the board of governors decided to open the bank's doors to non-African member states, many of them traditional donors today. It took five years for that decision to take effect, and when it did, the rule of "double majority" vote was introduced. Now, a candidate can only win if he or she has secured at least 50.01 percent of the vote of regional members, and 50.01 percent of all member countries, which include nonregional members. That means whoever makes it to the short list needs to capture the interest not only of African countries, but also top non-African donors, particularly the United States, Japan, Germany, France and Canada, all part of the bank's top 10 shareholders as of May 2014. If no candidate meets this requirement, the board of directors is then expected to repeat the ballot voting, but with the candidate with the lowest votes dropped from the list. If this still fails, though, the board can opt to stop the voting on the fifth try and extend the term of the outgoing president (unless he is among the candidates for re-election) or appoint the current vice president to serve as acting president for a term not exceeding one year. AfDB experienced two of these impasses before: in 1976, when the board was forced to extend the term of Tunisia’s Abdelwahab Labidi; and in 1995, when the board had to convene twice for the elections, with the second event taking them nine rounds before they were able to declare Omar Kabbaj from Morocco as the bank's seventh president. Timeline Aspiring presidents to the bank need the support of both their country's representative and at least another member country’s representative who are sitting on the board of governors. Given the current timetable, candidates then have almost seven months from today to campaign and gather support from regional members before candidacy submission closes on Jan. 30, 2015. The steering committee in charge of the whole election process is scheduled to publish the official list of nominees on Feb. 20. Candidates, meanwhile, are expected to submit a written statement of their vision for the bank a month after, and then during the bank's annual meetings in May, a dialogue will take place between candidates and board members before the election date on May 28. An AfDB president can be re-elected to a second term once. So despite member states' apparent approval of Donald Kaberuka, who was uncontested when he ran for re-election in 2010, he can no longer aspire to a third term. Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.