Editor,

Allow me to react to the article, "Nigeria's Adesina is AfDB's next president” (The New Times, May 29).AfDB’s President Akinwumi Adesina has an outsized pair of shoes to fill. We hope he is up to the task and wish him all the best in carrying out this task at Africa's premier banker.

We need him to succeed as we await the other shoe to drop (from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis whose structural causes powerful Western policy-makers never allowed to work themselves out of the financial system through normal failure of all but bankrupt financial institutions).

Mr. Adesina will need to be exceptionally agile to ensure the AfDB's reserves and its balance sheet are not swept away as collateral damage in the maelstrom of the coming Big Crash that the deliberate post-2008 bubble relating policies of all classes of financial assets by central bankers in major Western countries, through quantitative easing (in reality just a fancy term for creating money from thin air) and other funny-money operations to prop up their politically-powerful too-big-to-fail banks have made all of a certainty.

It is not a question of if, but rather of when.

Prudential asset management for value-maintenance rather than value-maximization will need to be high on the new president's agenda.

Mwene Kalinda