Newest Awo Laureate, Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, President, African Development Bank (AfDB), speaks about leadership and service from the heart. LANRE ADEWOLE and AKIN ADEWAKUN sat with the Food-Man of Africa for reflections, achievements and projections:
As the newest Awo Laureate, having just clinched the Obafemi Awolowo Leadership Award, how do you feel being in company of past recipients like former President Thabo Mbeki, Chief Afe Babalola and Professor Wole Soyinka?
I feel first and foremost elated and delighted that I was picked by the Selection Committee as the 2024 Awolowo Prize for Leadership winner. To me, being in such company is flattering because these are people who have really done incredible things in their lives and in the world. So, that is something I really treasure. But most importantly, every award for me is less about celebration; it’s about more responsibility, and the expectations to do more. I’m always very aware that awards are not to be hung. They are to be put in your heart, and with a responsibility to do more from it.
One of the key challenges that we have in Africa is that of a visionary and transformational leadership. How do we, as Africans, begin to work towards solving this problem?
I really believe that leaders are very fortunate people in the sense that you are actually put in charge of defining a vision, supporting people and transforming their lives. It’s almost like patients that put their lives in the hands of a medical doctor. So, the responsibility is on the leader to be very sharply-focused, to have a sense of duty and responsibility, to have a sense of accountability. They also have to know that it is less about the leader; it is more about the people you serve. I see leadership as a responsibility to do more for the people and to bring the future to the present faster than the people can actually think is possible. That is how leadership in my view can be more transformational. Leadership is service to the people. It is more of a service and accountability. It is to bring hope in the future to the present, faster than the people can imagine.
The question sir, is how do we, as Africans , begin to imbibe that transformational culture?
Imbibing that culture really requires that we have a mindset that is more about the people. I’m somebody who believes in accountability. Leadership without accountability is not the way to go. So first and foremost, you must have a sense of people-accountability. You must have people-centric leadership that understands that people want food, people want water, they want education, they want sanitation, infrastructure, they need technology to be able to survive and thrive in a new digital economy. So, I think first and foremost, leadership must start with accountability. Leadership must also understand that we are blessed in Africa. We have forests, we have minerals, agricultural land, because 65 percent of all the uncultivated arable land in the world is in Africa. We have the highest in terms of solar potential in the world. We have lithium that will drive the future of electric cars. Yes, we have all those resources, but two things I want to say is that the most important resource that we have is less of a natural resource, it’s human capital. Take away the natural resources, you can’t take away the brain of a highly trained, highly skilled people. So, the leadership must focus on the scaling up of the human capital. This is important.
Secondly , I would say in Africa, when I take a look at how much natural resource that we have, about $96.5 trillion, the question is how come we are poor? It just means that we are not managing those resources well. We have not been accountable to the people with those resources. So, we need transparency, we need accountability, we also need to be able to have better management that allows us to use our resources to develop. I grew out of poverty, so I’m always very mindful of the fact that you cannot have constant intra-generational transfer of poverty. So, leadership must also understand that there must be accountability for the poverty that you see. We can’t have a generation, poor,and another, poor. That’s what Papa Awolowo did. If not what he did, folks like us, probably would not be able to go to school, if education wasn’t free. That’s why I said that good leadership must be selfless, it must be more about the people, it must be accountable, it must be able to drive change in such a way that it brings a greater future to a population that you are part of, to happen now, rather than in the future.
Do you believe that we have a leadership problem in Africa?
I think we have multiple challenges in Africa that make us quite different from many parts of the world. And, they are unique to us. First, we have a rapidly- growing population which right now is about 1.4 billion people. This is going to rise to about 2.8 billion by 2050. That population needs to be fed, provided with water, sanitation, good roads, schools, and housing. The second challenge that we have is that we are buffeted by climate change. This makes it very difficult for us. Even though we have agricultural land, climate change means that most of the agriculture is dry land agriculture The third is that we have a constrained fiscal space, even though we have natural resources a lot. Most of our economies over time have been largely unimodal, like Nigeria where you just export one commodity. So, as the global environment changes, global commodity prices go up and down like a yoyo, that is how the livelihood of the people also go up in a yoyo situation. We also had a lot of challenges over time with peace and security, conflicts that had led to a large number of refugees in many parts of Africa. And, of course, the COVID-19 situation did not help us in the sense that many economies had to be closed. The fiscal space was conscripted. All I’m trying to say is that there are multiple challenges. We have made a lot of progress in Africa, which I’m proud of. When you take a look at it, it used to be interstate conflicts.
But when you look at the number of inter-state conflicts in Africa today, it has actually gone down. We have a number of democratic governments in Africa now than we used to have before. We are not perfect, neither is any part of the world perfect. But we are making great progress on that. Secondly, the challenges that we have now have to do more with non-state actors that are probably discontented for whatever reason; for lack of resources or inequitable sharing of resources, or people that are affected because of other challenges, because of terrorism or those kind of things that are coming up. So, I don’t want to say that we have leadership challenge; I think we have a development challenge that requires different types of leadership that understand those things and that can solve them faster.
I want to really commend our heads of state, I meet with them a lot, and I know that they are really committed to the people. But I think that Africa needs more resources, Africa needs more space to be able to participate in the global financial market , and get more resources. But whether you are a leader in Nigeria or in Ghana or in South Africa, or anywhere that you are, the challenges are the same: extreme poverty, high level of unemployment, massive infrastructure challenges, limited fiscal space. And so you need leaders therefore that constantly stay on the job. How do you change all of these? It’s a complex challenge, but I think with the right initiative that we have in Africa, we can surmount them.
We look at leaders like Obafemi Awolowo and Nelson Mandela; their memories have become eternal. Unfortunately, we no longer see what they represented today. First, what is your impression of Chief Obafemi Awolowo? Second, why are we not producing leaders like Obafemi Awolowo and Mandela again?
I don’t know the right word to actually use to describe Chief Awolowo, but I will try. First, he’s a larger than life personality, a great visionary, a people-centric leader, an accountable leader, who had public probity and also understood that people needed to have more opportunities opened up for them. Therefore, he was a leader who led from the heart because at the end of the day, great leaders don’t lead, in my view, from the head. Of course, you need the head to think, but you need your heart to act. And that is how I found out when I was growing up in Western Nigeria. What he did in Western Nigeria was beyond his time. People talk about sustainable development goals today, but what Chief Awolowo did was way beyond sustainable goals, then: free education, free health, making sure you can have an efficient, first rate public service, that is not consumed for itself, but purposely focused and delivering high quality public service for people. I remember growing up in Ibadan, I used to go Jericho Nursing Home. That was where my parents used to take us. My father was in the civil service, and we had such top quality healthcare at that time. I went to school in Seventh Day Adventist Secondary School in Oke Bola.
We had good schools, good classrooms, uniforms, books. We had things like that. So, what I want to say about Chief Awolowo is that Papa Awolowo was almost like an enigma because he combined so many things. Why I admire him a lot, and why we are very similar in so many ways is his welfarist policy, and as a leader in my own capacity, I always say my life is only as good to the extent it is used to transform the lives of people: nothing more, nothing less. Nelson Mandela was a unifier, he inherited a country that was going to go into total chaos. He was able to manage that. And I think that’s a characteristic of what I would call great leaders. To be a great leader, it should be less about yourself.
The first thing a leader must do is to manage their ego. It’s not about you, it’s about the people you lead. You may feel as terrible as you want to feel, as Mandela felt terrible, but it was less about him; it was about the people, about the country he was going to give birth to. And they are going to live much longer than him, and so he was able to unify a country split on racial lines, split along ethnic lines, historical injustices, and all of that. And I think creating those kinds of leaders today, I will say, requires that we have a good knowledge, and a sense of history. Somebody said that mistakes continued to be made because people refuse or are unable to learn the last time. I think the school of leadership is not a theoretical school. It’s a school where you look like leaders like Awolowo, like Mandela and several others. What they did, and why they did it. And one thing that you will find consistently in the lives of great leaders is that they are selfless.
But why is it difficult for the present crop of leaders to follow the template that leaders like Obafemi Awolowo and Nelson Mandela created?
There are a lot of great leaders in the world. There are great leaders in Africa as well. But I think the critical thing that I would say that we need to do more is that leaders don’t have the luxury of complaints because the people don’t eat complaints. Leaders must have the ability to look at problems and solve them. That’s why you are there, as a leader. I think more and more, we must have that sense of urgency, that drive; that you are actually responsible for the lives of the people. At the African Development Bank where I’m the president, I’m very impatient with underdevelopment, because I don’t see any reason why we should not be having electricity, why we should not be having water and sanitation. They are things other nation’s have done before. It’s not as if you are creating something new.
But you would not be able to do that if you don’t have accountability, if you don’t hold yourself accountable for that. So I think that rather than even compare leaders, I’m much more interested in what the leaders do, what the leaders must do for their people. And, in my view, sometimes I think leaders are too quickly vilified, perhaps for not doing enough when they should have done more than they’ve done. I don’t think we should spoil leaders through ululation. Leaders should be held accountable and people should demand more from them.
We noticed you were trying not to characterize. But if you look at the trend now in the continent, especially within the West African region, the military, which should be an anathema to civil governance, is making an incursion back to government houses and the people are jubilating. They are saying if democracy is not delivering, why don’t we embrace an alternative, even when that alternative doesn’t look right? So we are still going to characterise the leaders we have now. Is it that they are more selfish, or they are less selfless than the leaders of old?
The thing is that when one looks at what is just happening with the military and all of that, I think the greatest antidote to anti-democratic moves is good governance. It’s transparency. It’s accountability. It’s inclusiveness and the ability to manage diversity. Regardless of the country that you are, you have different ethnic groups, religious groups, different economic groups, different interests. The ability to understand that and the ability to pay attention to that diversity should not become your weakness. That diversity should become strength. If I go to your garden in your home, or in my home, you find different kinds of plants there. But the beauty of that garden is the diversity of the plants that you have there. If you want to have a beautiful garden, then you must learn to understand that the garden must be diverse. So the job of a leader, therefore, is how to make that garden to look like just what you want, it’s the ability to manage that. In some cases where you have anti-democratic movements, militaries, that are coming back, I think the greatest antidote is just good governance; accountability, inclusiveness and participation of people in the governance process. And for the leaders, if I don’t hold myself accountable, what am I a leader for? What are you judging me on? I have to set particular targets that are good for my organisation, that are good for the people that I lead, and then the people must hold me accountable to that. So, I think that we can categorise leaders, we can compare leaders, we can do everything. I guess my point is that the utilitarian value of a leader is not what they are, intrinsically; it is, perhaps, what they use what they have intrinsically to do for the people that put them there.
We will call you the Foodman of Africa; you want everybody to be well-fed. And since we began this session, you’ve been talking about food security and you are in charge of ensuring that. Now something strange is happening in Nigeria: people are practically taking the law into their own hands to feed. They are now breaking into warehouses, the clearest indication that something is inherently wrong with what is happening around us, and we have situation like that all over Africa. What is the future saying from your vantage position?
You know that when I was Minister of Agriculture here, the main thing that I tried to do, and which by God’s grace I think we succeeded in, was for people to recognise that agriculture is not a way of life, agriculture is a business. People don’t drink oil, they don’t smoke gas, but they eat food every single day. Three times a day. So the most important thing is being able to assure that food security, and assuring that food security by producing it yourself. I don’t believe in begging, because any nation that begs for food is not even worth to be called one. It doesn’t matter how your neighbour loves you, your neighbour will not send your kid to school. That’s your responsibility. And so at the continental level, since I became president of the African Development Bank, I launched five programs, five initiatives: light to empower Africa, electricity for everybody, two, to feed Africa, which is food security for all. Third is to industrialize Africa, create jobs, transform your value chain and become global player.
Then to integrate Africa, that is, use your size, 54 countries, with 1.4 bilion people as a domestic market in which you can reach and therefore turn that into your own economic advantage that reduces your dependency on others. I’m not saying you don’t trade, but you are able to capture that particular market. Finally, to improve the quality of the people of Africa, it has do to with health, education, water, sanitation. So, when you were talking about the issue of food, I want to put it in a context of all of that. At the African Development Bank, we’ve committed to spending $20 billion on agriculture, food security because I really believe you cannot have macro-economic stability, you cannot have full employments or jobs, unless you have agriculture performing at its fullest because 70 percent of your population, depend on it. That’s why I say it has to be a business that explodes opportunities. It’s not a way of life. At the bank, we have a programme called Technology for African Agriculture, which is to allow farmers in Africa to have high-performing technologies for crops, for livestock, for fishes that allow them to have great productivity.
Take Ethiopia for example, By the way, the President of Ethiopia is going to be here for this event, in three years; we gave them heat-tolerant wheat varieties. In less than four years, they became 100 percent self-sufficient in wheat. This year, they became a net exporter of wheat for the first time in their history. It just tells you what the power of technology can do. Secondly, when we had a situation with the case of global food insecurity, especially coming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the price of wheat went up and that caused a lot of global inflation in the food value chain globally. But I remember I was asked to come and testify in US Senate Committee on what could be done about that. And I said ‘ I don’t believe Africa should go with bowl in hand to beg. I believe Africa should put seeds in its bowl and plant it because there is no dignity in begging for food’. And that’s what we did. We immediately launched a $1.5 billiion facility approved by our board. We are currently working with 30 million farmers across 34 countries to produce 38 million metric tonnes of food, which I must say, with eight million metric tonnes of food more than what Africa had imported from Russia, and from Ukraine.
It just tells you that we have the potential. And I ask myself, It’s a different thing to work in the short term, but the biggest gain is the long-term. How do we ensure we have food security completely? And that’s how I got together with the president of Senegal, and we both decided we should put together what is called the ‘Feed Africa Summit’. The summit is the first of such summits in Africa. It brought together 34 heads of states and governments physically and we had global players; everybody around the world. Then what happened? We decided that, what each country must do to become 100 percent sufficient in food; sovereignty in food for five years.
We were not just talking. We had clear plans that we made, with two things: one, hold our leaders accountable for feeding the continent. Every head of state chaired a meeting, we called it Investment Boardroom. Each side of boardrooms, players in the agricultural industry, global policy makers, and we asked the head of state, ‘what would it take for Nigeria, for Ghana, for Mali, for Niger, for Malawi, for whatever country, to be totally self-sufficient in food in five years. We mapped that together. And, I’m happy that to tell you that we were able, by the end of the 72 hours of the Summit, to raise $30 billion to implement it, and within six weeks we had raised globally $72 billion to implement it. So, I believe that there are certain problems that you have to quickly solve because you can’t continue to say you can’t feed yourself forever. Everybody is manufacturing aircraft. People are going to the moon, and all of that, we shouldn’t be worrying about basic things of what people are going to eat, everyday. Those are basic fundamental things that we should solve.
How is Nigeria benefitting?
And if you are talking of Nigeria, and I understand the food price inflation that is there, caused by several factors. But we at the bank are strongly supportive of Nigeria. As I speak to you, we have provided $134 million to Nigeria for an emergency food production plan, which is going on right now. And that plan, as we are entering March, we have supported Nigeria to grow 118,000 hectares of wheat, the same heat-tolerant wheat that we did for Ethiopia. We have compelled Nigeria to cultivate 118,000 hectares. In addition to that, by March, we will help Nigeria to grow an additional 150,000 hectares of maize, and by the raining season which starts in May, we will do 300,000 hectares of maize, 150,000 hectares of cassava and 50,000 hectares of soybean. What happens is that the end of this month, Nigeria will get an additional one million metric tonnes of wheat, and by the time we run the other part in the main season, Nigeria will get an additional four million metric tonnes of wheat. Of course, we are going to be supportive and we are strongly supportive. We are helping the president to deal with this particular issue. So that’s why I’m saying that leaders don’t have the luxury of praise. If you look at a surgeon, patients can only praise a surgeon when the surgery is successful, not while the surgery is going on. Leaders must be like that.
As Minister of Agriculture, you brought so much life, so many reforms into the ministry, and it’s an open secret that the ministry was one of the success stories of the administration in which you served. What happened to the template and legacy you left behind, since many believe if those templates had been followed by your successors, we wouldn’t be where we are today?
I couldn’t agree more with you. You know, if you are ever going to build a skyscraper, you never keep breaking down your foundations. You have to build on those foundations. Nations that do that develop as long as those foundations are solidly built. We’re talking about Papa Awolowo, the same foundation that he built is what I’m doing with the African Development Bank, with the whole of Africa. In the case of food, we did something when I was minister, we said we could not produce food if the farmers can’t get access to the input. The electronic wallet system I brought in, allowed us to reach the farmers directly, to have access to our fertilizers, 15 million farmers, was what we did. And that allowed us at that time to produce an additional 21 million metric tonnes of food . You know as a Minister of Agriculture, you cannot claim credit for what God gives naturally, even if you did nothing, and there’s rain, some crops would grow.
The job of a minister is to do something on top of that. That’s what we did. And it ended corruption in the area of fertilisers. Unfortunately,. those programmes were not continued. I was in Bayero University recently for a honorary doctorate degree, and so many farmers were saying they want to have the electronic wallet system back. In fact, when that thing was removed, it was one of the major causes of food insecurity because farmers no longer got access to fertilizers. The second thing I want to say is that there must be continuity of policies, but beyond that, there must be accountability. I keep coming back to this thing all the time, about accountability. So, I really believe that we need to do more, produce more, and then accelerate food production. That’s why at the African Development Bank, we are supporting Nigeria now from where I am, with $520 million for what is called Special Agro-Processing Zones. They are new zones, but are basically put with power, water, roads, infrastructure and processing facilities. So, you can process and add value to everything, and that would transform the rural areas from what I call today, Zones of Economic Misery to Zones of Economic Prosperity. And we put $520 million there, ourselves, the Islamic Development Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Already, we are working on a second phase with all the governors in the country. And that second phase will be a billion US dollars. It would be for 28 states. We are working on that, developing again for this year. But why are we doing that? Let me say again that we should take a step back to Baba Awolowo and give a context to it; one, you know when Baba Awolowo was alive, one of the best things that he did was farm estate program. He created farm estate in rural areas. What those things did; they allowed farmers to bring their outputs, cocoa to grade them, bag them. It stabilized prices for those things. What happened? Agbeloba (Farmer is king) came. Farmers became richer, and the way you would know whether a rural economy is working, apart from looking at the people, just look at the rooftops, just keep looking at it. Is it thatched roof or corrugated iron sheet? You began to see the change in that. I think what has really happened is that we’ve abandoned the rural economy, and when people don’t have hope, and they feel abandoned, that’s what happens. So, I come back to the issue of accountability. We must be accountable, and have policies determined to change that situation, and you can not, unless you turn agriculture into a big money-making business that can transform economy across our rural areas.
But how were you able to achieve all that as a technocrat, in an environment, a political space usually considered toxic by non-politicians, as Agric Minister?
It comes from my leadership style. First, I’m accountable to God for what I do. Secondly, I’m accountable to my conscience, and my conscience will not let me do something that is wrong. And so, when I was appointed by the President, I knew that the president had given me a responsibility that I carried on my shoulder. And it was not a responsibility of comfort. I made sure that I could feed the country, every single day that I worked as minister; that was my focus. My wife would probably tell you that when I was a minister, I had no life. I was constantly working. I was in the farm all the time. I was talking to the private sector, all the time. I was consumed by what I was doing because I knew that was a responsibility. I was also able to learn. That helped me at that time.
First, I had a president that was extremely supportive. I was running a lot of reforms, and some of those reforms were not popular reforms. They were drastic reforms. We were trying to kick corruption out of the system. You needed to have the president’s full support. I had that. I used to tell President Jonathan, ‘Mr. President, you gave me 100 percent support, but I served you loyally for 3,000 percent.” So that was one. The second thing is that you cannot work alone. No matter how smart you are, the ability to work with others is what achieves success. I had to work with state governments. I remember going to the President, asking him to give me 36 director positions, and he said, “What are you talking about? Who gives that kind of position?” And I said “Mr. President, if you want to go to war, you have to have the right teams that you need to prosecute it. Agriculture is done at the states. They have the land there. We can run as a federal thing from here. We have to go there, and design good policies, but work with the states to co-own it with us. So that that success is a success between us and the state government, and the accountability is theirs.
I said, “Mr. President, when inflation comes you add up food price inflation from various states, you add again food price inflation national index, then it becomes our responsibility at the centre because you are not intervening where you supposed to be intervening.” He gave me permission to have these 36 directors, and we did. We appointed directors to each of the states and we went there, whether it is improving access to finance to farmers, we were doing well with the state governments, and that was what really drove a lot of it. Thirdly, you know when a dentist tries to pull teeth he has to create some pains, but it’s not deliberate pain. He’s trying to fix something. I remember some of my directors; I pushed them so hard, it’s like pulling out some teeth. But it wasn’t deliberate because I knew we had to work in a way that was accountable.
I remember telling some of my directors when I started that ‘You know, I come here and we have department of livestock, department of crops and others.” I said good, but when I went to the market, nobody was buying department, but they were buying food. So we had to change the financing framework to reflect; rice, maize, yam, cassava, groundnut, cocoa. That was it. So when I was minister, we changed the entire budget system to focus on that, because that’s what people see in the market.
That’s why we were able to succeed a lot because it was something that was quite revolutionary, and that’s how we started value-chain accountability. That’s what I’m saying. And I must say that I couldn’t have done all I did without my wife, because sometimes I have to say that it’s pretty risky, a lot of things I did then. Without having a wife that is very supportive and prayerful, I wouldn’t have been able to do all of it. So all I just want to say is that, the opportunities are immense in Nigeria, and but we need to constantly work together. But there must be accountability. I remember telling President Jonathan then that ‘ For me, I think the job of a minister is not to fly around, but to serve with the pleasure of the president, and get the job done’.
At what point did you take that decision to practically live for the people, and who would you say influenced this?
It came from my upbringing. My father started off as a poor farmer, and he grew up in the village. My grandfather was a farmer, and my father, at the age of 14, could not read or write. Then one day, one of his uncles came from Lagos. He was at that time Magistrate’s Registrar in Lagos. He came to the village. My father said ‘I can’t read and write, Sir. I need to go to school. I can’t even read the hymn book’. So that was how, based on his generosity, he took my father out of the village to Lagos. That’s how my father went to Igbobi College, that’s how I got education. And that always reminded me that it is not a question of what you are, or where you are, or what you inherited. It’s a question of opportunities you make for yourself, and you create those opportunities for others, that would determine their success in life. From that moment, my life has always been how to expand such opportunities for others, because if that man had not done what he did, you would not be interviewing me today. And so that influence shaped my entire thinking, and way of life. Secondly, when I went to secondary school, my father could have sent me to Igbobi College, could have sent me to Kings’ College, could have sent me anywhere, but he sent me to a village school, a good school, but happened to be in the village: Ejigbo Baptist High School. I was nine years old when I started secondary school, and I saw so many things there. One day I asked my dad, ‘Why did you send me to this school in the village, when you could have sent me to any other school?’ He looked at me, and he said, ‘Akin, I did not know what God will make you in life, but if God ever made you anybody in life, from that village, you will know exactly what to do’. And that became my guiding light, because I saw poverty real time.
I saw my classmates who were in school when agriculture worked, and were out of school when it wasn’t working. I saw the challenges of rural health care, people were dying. So I told myself that ‘Oh, my dad was right. I had no excuse of not knowing what the problems are, the only thing is whether I would do the right thing. That’s why I thank God because it’s only God that gives the enablement to do things, ideas to do things. But the only thing that I can say is that I actually don’t consider my life to be more than that it’s only good to the extent that it is used of God to transform the lives of the people. It’s my very essence of living. The only thing that matters to me. Even as President of African Development Bank, my staff are here, the only thing that drives me is that why can’t development be faster? Why can’t we make the lives of the people much faster, in terms of development. In the last eight years that I’ve been president of the bank, our work has impacted on about 400 million people. Just think of that in a short time. I put my guys under a lot of pressure. I always tell them when we are talking that the poor people we are supposed to be responsible for are not there, in that boardroom, but if you strain your ears enough, you must be able to hear them. And you must be able to feel them. They are not statistics; they are people with real needs. And I say as President of Africa’s premier financial institution, I can’t think of anything more honourable than to be given the task of the responsibility and the resources to go and change the lives of the people of the continent where I was born. Nothing more! That’s what drives me.
You made history while in the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) as the first student to graduate with a first class in Agricultural Economics. Do we assume you were a bookworm? Second, are you ruling politics, or is it in the horizon?
Thank you. On the first one, I would not be telling you the truth if I told you I was studious all the time. I had a lot of fun. I was somebody who liked to party a lot. But a time came, that’s why I like this quote in the Bible, which says: ‘When I was a child, I behaved like a child, but when I grew up, I left my childhood ways.’ I enjoyed my time in the university. All of that changed at a period in time. I used to be quite rascally. So when I became born-again, I think I got more sober. I got more studious. I had great professors that I really admired; that influenced me a lot. That was something I’m always very grateful for. I have two kids, one of them a medical student in US, when he was growing up, I thought he was a little bit naughty sometimes. I would say ‘he did this,’ and my father would say ‘what did he do compared to what you did’. But we thank God in everything; it’s the end that matters. And to your question, regarding politics, I always look at myself in any position that God has put me as an instrument for change.
But an instrument in the hands of God does not determine how God uses it. An instrument must never conflict itself with the doer. It’s the only reason I do what I do. When my staff members look at me, they can’t understand how I work. I can work like this for three days non-stop. And when they meet with me, in global meetings, and sometimes I have been working for 48 hours non-stop, and they ask me.’Mr. President, why do you do that?’ And I tell them ‘I don’t have a job, I have a mission. I’m driven by my mission. It’s not a job for me. And in any place I find myself, this will always apply.
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