East African Development Bank (EADB) director-general Vivienne Yeda Apopo has exited after 17 years at the helm of the regional lender.
EADB announced the exit of the seasoned banker and business lawyer, effective December 31, 2024, with the regional lender tapping its head of finance Benard Mono to replace Yeda in the interim pending the conclusion of recruitment for the role.
“Ms Yeda’s retirement follows an outstanding 17-year career with the bank, having joined in 2008,” said the EADB.
Ms Yeda is a Kenyan and served as the chair of the board of Kenya Power and Lighting Company for two and half years before being pushed out by the Kenya Kwanza administration.
The bank's shareholders are the four founding member states of the East African Community, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
But her tenure at the EADB has been chequered.
In May 2023, for instance, the former National Treasury Cabinet Secretary Njuguna Ndung’u called a meeting to deliberate on her term, and a “questionable expenditure of $2.8 million” incurred on legal fees between 2014 and 2020.
That was after she was pushed out of the board of Kenya Power in December 2022 having served for two and a half years as chairperson.
The new Kenya Kwanza administration demanded her exit from the utility firm via a letter from the National Treasury.
When the Kenya Kwanza administration raised questions about the botched power purchase agreement between Kenya Power and the Lake Turkana Wind Project, in which the power distributor paid the independent power producer Sh17 billion without the latter supplying it with power, Ms Yeda was adversely mentioned.
On November 23, 2022, Joseph Makilap, the MP for Baringo North told Parliament that there might have been conflict of interest in the botched power purchase agreement “whereby the Director-General for the East African Development Bank, the bank that provided the loan to finance the project, one Ms Yeda Apopo Vivienne, is also the chairperson of KPLC.”
In 2016, reports emerged that the EADB staff wanted her fired for favouring her home country. The staff alleged that she approved most of the Kenyan projects while those in the rest of the partner states were delayed.
Yeda seems to have braved all these challenges and has been praised for the manner in which she has grown the bank’s loan book and reduced its stockpile of bad loans.
EADB’s non-performing loans contracted from 26 percent in 2009 to 0.88 percent in 2024, thanks to an aggressive loan recovery strategy.
Perhaps no Kenyan has felt the pinch of EADB’s aggressive loan recovery strategy under Ms Yeda more than the former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju.
Mr Tuju, who accuses the EADB of predatory lending, is at risk of losing two of his prime properties for non-payment of Sh933 million loan to EADB.
In his appeal, Mr Tuju accused EADB of engaging in a shylock-like behaviour where a lender deceitfully entices, induces and assists a borrower to take a loan that carries high fees. The motive for such behaviour is normally to elbow out the borrower from his or her business.
