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Adedeji also worked hard to achieve, via the first OAU economic Summit in Lagos, the Lagos Plan of Action. This, as Adedeji would be the first to admit, came at the wrong time and had little possibility of follow-up despite a number of subsequent 'action' plans that passed through the UN system. The same can be said of his last achievement in this direction - the setting up of the African Economic Community - again at a summit in Nigeria in 1991, which was actually a direct result of a mandate given in the Final Act of Lagos in 1980. This has more prospects for follow-up although it is marking time at the moment, as it is heavily dependent on the four sub-regional groupings becoming operational. Even Adedeji's own proposal that ECOWAS should eventually swallow up subsidiary groupings within its fold, such as the francophone bloc (CEAO, and later UEMOA) and the Mano River Union, has been contradicted by subsequent events.

Looking at the obstacles on the path to integration in all zones it is hard to see, with the best will in the world, the AEC springing to life in 2015. Adedeji's own view, expressed in a speech in Addis Ababa in 2003, is now that it was the "economism of regional cooperation" without also taking political and social integration into consideration that "contributed significantly to the lack of progress in the actualisation of the vision." He also regretted bitterly that what he called Africa's 'lost decade' of the 1980s, in which the progress of the two previous decades ran into the sand, coincided with the world's great push to  globalisation which, ironically, in itself has impaired the growth of multilateralism.

The lost decade had many hardships, not least the intolerable growth of the debt burden, but the ECA was still able to mark the milestones of its 20th and 25th anniversaries with a measure of satisfaction. The organisation itself was expanding, taking under its wing a range of dependent inter-governmental African organisations, variously funded from the UN or the donor community. Adedeji himself was also increasingly concerned at the 'top-down' approach to African economic issues, so in some ways his particular legacy was the new push for participation that came in with the wave of democracy in the early 1990s. In 1990 governments and civil society came together at a conference in Arusha to sign a historic charter for Popular Participation in Development and Transformation, which spoke of "a new era in Africa in which democracy and a more just, progressive society would be created." This is still the dream; it was incorporated into the African Union at the end of the decade; and is now embodied in the AU's Economic and Social Consultative Council (ECOSOCC). Professor Adedeji, now in his mid-seventies and heading a think-tank in Nigeria, is certainly still on the case.

However, there are those who would say that Adedeji's lasting memorial was in spearheading the fight against the donor-imposed structural adjustments conceived by the World Bank in the 1980s, part of an ideological sea-change in international economic thinking of which Africa was at one and the same time guinea-pig and victim.

Adedeji was at a good vantage point to see the corrosive damage of those policies, however much virtue may have come from balanced budgets and realistic exchange rates), and had a number of frontal confrontations on the issue with leading scions of the international donor community, notably Barber Conable of the World Bank.

There are many who suggest, and which I endorsed as an observer at the time, that the articulation of African alarm at the damage being done was a major factor in the change of course at the end of the decade. This may have been facilitated by the end of the Cold War and the opportunity for the international community to put both democracy and corruption for the first time on the agenda. But it happened well before the advent of the liberal-minded Jim Wolfensohn to 'M' Street in 1995, and the reduction or alleviating (or even eliminating) of poverty to the international development agenda.

K. Y. Amoako, again was a different kind of mover, more appropriate perhaps to the time in which he moved, but bearing the mindset of the World Bank like others from that nursery who have moved on to jobs in Africa.  This made him a good person to face the technological revolution of the 1990s and the challenges of globalisation in such areas as the 'digital divide.' He engaged in reforms that he has said were "aimed at making the Commission a more rigorous centre of excellence," with revamped research and advocacy work to make it more "policy relevant." One result has been the progressive merger of ECA ministers with African Finance Ministers in one meeting parallel with the African Development Bank assemblies, a welcome and prudent rationalisation.

Amoako's unideological and pragmatic stance did lead to some criticisms that he was too much on the wavelength of the donors, embodsied in his priority of "promoting a transformed partnership between Africa and its international development partners that is based on African ownership and responsibilities…" But the various advocacy activities, such as the annual Media Forum have been important and timely. It was probably because of his determination to keep Africa on the inside track of the world's concerns that he was selected by Tony Blair in 2004 as a suitable member of the Commission for Africa. But when looking for another job he fell out in the early stages of the 2005 contest to become President of the African Development Bank.

As for the future, bearing in mind that the ECA has to keep its end up not just in competition with the many tentacles of the UNDP and the legitimate activities of other specialised agencies which often have major operations in Africa, there is clearly an important role in its time-honoured role of partner with the African Union, reinforced by  their common presence in Addis Ababa. This is particularly important in view of the continuing urgency behind the NEPAD project of the AU, to which the ECA has an abiding back-up contribution to make, as it has had with other regional organisations. Indeed NEPAD, with its sensible preoccupation with implementation, could be in a position to pick up where the Lagos Plan of Action and the AEC left off, as in the areas of infrastructure and industrialisation. The ECA has the kind of structural connection to the international community through the UN system that, positively used, can be of great use to NEPAD.

The ECA is a body that is so taken for granted that even the new African Development Bank President did not include it when he listed Africa's three pillars for development as being the ADB, the AU and NEPAD. It is true that it is, strictly speaking, a UN body whose boss bears the rank of Under-Secretary General. But there has always been an element of African ownership, and Africans like to believe that the ECA is their institution. The work done by its three main driving forces has been such that they should always be included in the history of African achievement. Despite this, and despite all the more developed efforts at advocacy that have happened in the last decade, it tends to be forgotten in that history. As such it remains to some extent Africa's best kept secret.

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