The President/Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Africa Export and Import Bank, Professor Benedict Oramah, is exiting the bank at a time when international rating agencies are downgrading the bank.
The latest downgrade came from Moody’s, which slashed Afreximbank’s rating from Baa1 to Baa2, two notches above a sub-investment grade or “junk” rating, and changed its outlook from negative to stable.
According to the rating commentary, Moody’s downgrade, which is two steps from being rated speculative, which would limit the pool of funds allowed to invest in the lender’s debt, was based on what the rating agency said was a weaker-than-expected asset performance.
This current rating came weeks after Fitch downgraded the bank just to one notch above junk with a negative outlook, citing high credit risks and weak risk-management policies. Fitch stated that based on its estimate, the bank’s non-performing loans stood at 7.1 per cent higher than the six per cent ‘high risk’ threshold outlined in Fitch’s criteria at end-2024. This rating had been contested by the African Peer Review Mechanism, an instrument of the African Union Member States, saying the downgrade was based on flawed loan classification.
Moody’s in its latest rating, stated, “The bank’s recent shift to unsecured lending to sovereigns under stress has introduced significant risks, diverging from its typical focus on trade finance, and heightened its sensitivity to its difficult operating environment. Sovereign lending to Ghana and Zambia poses capital risks, as the Common Framework mandates restructuring comparable to private-sector creditor losses,” Moody’s stated.
Meanwhile, Afreximbank, in a statement on Thursday, said that Oramah has taken a bow from serving at the helm of the institution for the last decade, a period touted to be transformational and exceptional.
While giving his closing speech during the Afreximbank Annual Meetings 2025, Professor Oramah took the audience down memory lane, from June 2015, when shareholders gave him a leadership mandate in Lusaka, Zambia, saying, “In my acceptance speech, I made a solemn promise to the shareholders to deliver a solid bank that will be a leader among its peers in all measures of financial performance to quickly grow the capital of the bank in absolute terms, to improve capitalisation through innovative capital management initiatives to ensure first-class risk management, and to achieve adequate returns to shareholders.”
Professor Oramah highlighted the achievements of the bank during his tenure, saying, “We have collectively, over the past decade, built a solid financial institution that is good for global Africa. Total assets and guarantees grew more than eightfold between September 2015 and April 2025, to reach $43.5bn. Total revenues also rose sevenfold, reaching $3.24bn from $408m in 2025.
“Net income amounted to about $1bn last year, about a 700 per cent increase from its level of $125m in 2015. Internal capital generation and very strong support of shareholders through significant additional equity investments saw shareholders’ funds rise from about $1bn in September 2015 to $7.5bn in April 2025, with callable capital reaching $4.5bn from $450m in September 2015. Liquidity remained strong, with sources of funding much more diversified in 2024 than in 2015, due to activities of the Africa Resource Mobilisation Unit, which saw the share of African sources of funding rise from 11.7 per cent in 2015 to 36.6 per cent in May 2025.”
On the look, Oramah said that the bank would like to give priority to the financing and promoting of high-value exports that have the capability of stabilising export revenues and creating jobs, thereby raising and stabilising trade and the economy in Africa.
A Cameroonian national, George Elombi, is set to become the new president of Afreximbank. Elombi has been with Afreximbank since 1996, joining as a legal officer.
