In a shabby rented flat in 1950s Alexandria, in Egypt, a small boy with barely
enough food to eat dreamt of becoming the next Einstein or Marie Curie.
The small boy is now one of the richest men in Britain and next week in London
he will award the world’s richest honorary prize, a whopping $5 million
(£2.7 million). He will then return to Alexandria with Kofi Annan and Nelson
Mandela to fête the winner — but before you enter the draw, strict terms and
conditions apply.
The Ibrahim prize, named after its creator, Mo Ibrahim, is a unique, untested
experiment designed to raise the expectations of an entire continent: it can
be won only by a sub-Saharan African leader who has governed democratically,
honestly and well, and quits on time. It is a kind of Nobel prize for
Africa’s good guys.
Mr Ibrahim, a telecoms billionaire, may not have won a Nobel prize for science
but his spectacular career was built on a kind of genius: for spotting the
right market years ahead of competitors, who sniggered at his foolishness.
So has he done it again, and come up with an inspired answer to Africa’s
problems? Or is the prize just another bribe? “Of course not,” he said, from
his elegant office in Central London. “The money is a pragmatic thing,
because your leaders here have the speech circuit. They write memoirs, they
sit on the boards of great banks, they have their financial future secured,
and rightly so.
“Now, what happens to a good African leader after he leaves office? Nothing.
It is a tough life. Suddenly you take away the mansion and the presidential
car, you take away everything and, you know, the state pension is actually
very, very small. Don’t you think we are really creating a situation where
we are putting people under unreasonable pressure to stay in office?”
Knowing what they had to look forward to, it was actually to their credit that
many African presidents avoided corruption, he said. But if an African
leader were good already, would the encouragement of the prize not be
redundant, just as, if he were bad he would be a lost cause?
“Sometimes people think this is a way to stop people taking bribes but, if the
president of a country decided to take bribes, $5 million is nothing and it
would be morally corrupt if we did try to compete with that,” Mr Ibrahim
explained.
“What we are saying is forget about the bad apples. Some people must have done
something good. We should look for a hero, and honour such a person. Your
Prime Minister, two weeks ago, honoured an African man in Parliament Square.
He said, if I recall correctly, that Mandela was the greatest leader of the
20th century. So if Africa is able to produce the greatest leader in the
world for the 20th century, can’t we produce another guy?”
Was he not tempted to divert the prize money to aid projects? No, he said
firmly. This $5 million was the best investment he could make. “It exerts
pressure, it exposes, it improves. If you have slight improvement in a
government that is a big incentive for us,” he said.
One thing in Mr Ibrahim’s favour is that he has Harvard on his side. In
another pioneering move, he set up an index of African governance at the
university in the United States (“They have got the best scientists to do
this,” he said). The index measures how well each African nation is doing,
not on opinion, but on 58 verifiable statistics that range from the
percentage of girls in secondary school to the number of power shortages, as
well as the more usual stuff about gross domestic product and life
expectancy. The highest-rising country this year has been Rwanda.
Nine days from today, using the Harvard research, a committee chaired by Mr
Annan will choose out of 13 African leaders who left office between 2004 and
2006 the first winner of the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African
Leadership. The winner will receive $5 million over ten years and $200,000 a
year beyond that, for life, exceeding the $1.3 million awarded for the Nobel
Peace Prize. The winner will also be fêted at the Alexandria Library in
Egypt, the site of the most prestigious library of the ancient world,
established in the 3rd century BC. The great and good of Africa will be
there, as will Lord Malloch Brown, Gordon Brown’s new Africa minister and Mr
Ibrahim’s good friend.
“And right in front of it they had the lighthouse, Alexandria lighthouse,
which was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. So we thought, there is a
great symbol of the dark continent, which really gave light to the world. We
had a library 2,000 years ago! The greatest library in the world!”
Sceptics of Mr Ibrahim’s enthusiasm would be wise to look at his life story. A
few decades ago he was sharing a small bedroom with his brother. His father,
a junior clerk, sacrificed all he had to send him to school. “It was a
hand-to-mouth kind of life, it was a struggle.”
He said that his wife, whom he met at university in Alexandria, had to sell
her last jewellery to pay for her final year of studies. “I feel a little
bit awkward when I see kids going to university who do not appreciate what
it means, and spend their time just lingering in the bar,” he said.
He became an engineer at Sudan’s national telephone company before making the
first of his amazingly prescient moves. He saw a taxi driver communicate
with his head office using a radio, and an idea was born. In the mid-1970s,
when mobile phones were still the stuff of science fiction, he began
research that helped to lay the foundations for the modern mobile phone. “It
was a very small industry at the time . . . we were hoping that it would
grow once we had the breakthroughs.”
British Telecom was so impressed that it plucked him from academe to design
its first network (one of only two in Britain). As so often in Mr Ibrahim’s
career, however, he was ahead of his time: BT failed to share his vision, to
its cost.
His network was an overnight, oversubscribed, commercial success, but BT was
too much of a monolith to cope. There were too many committees delaying too
many decisions and “it was just absolutely crap”.
Frustrated, he left and promptly made millions with his own consultancy — “we
designed most of the cellular networks in Europe, actually” — while BT’s
mobile phone business was eclipsed by rivals.
His is a rags-to-riches fairytale, but it took leaving Africa for it to
happen. Although he wants to be an inspiration to young African businessmen,
he is also an advert for the continent’s brain drain.
He said that his emigration was not planned and explains that for years he and
his wife never bought a house because they thought that they would be
returning soon. “Then one day we woke up and we said, OK, we are unable to
go back now.”
He said that he was proud that his wife had recently gone back to Sudan to
build a hospital that specialised in the treatment of breast cancer. “If she
didn’t leave [Africa], she would never have been able to develop that for
[Sudan]. I went and built 15 telephone companies in Africa. If I had stayed
in Africa, I would not have managed to do that and I would never have
created so many jobs.” If he had stayed, where would he be now? “I would
have been retiring today from the state telecoms department, unless I had
been kicked off for political reasons. They always take out people who are
not politically sound.”
Back to England and Mr Ibrahim’s next astonishing leap of faith. In 1998, when
the main news of Africa reaching the West was of terrible famine in Sudan,
Mr Ibrahim decided that it was time to launch an African mobile telephone
network (one that would refuse to pay bribes). Competitors thought him mad.
Seven years later, his company, Celtel, was sold for $3.4 billion. How did
he do it? “There is a gap between reality and perception. Africa has its
problems, but many African countries are just normal countries and many
African people are just normal people,” he said.
“In a way it creates an opportunity for people like us, but it is also bad for
Africa, because investment is greatly affected by a lack of coverage, and
lack of objective coverage.”
This gets to the heart of Mr Ibrahim’s campaign: relentlessly positive and
focused on business and governance, in contrast to most of the other
approaches to Africa, including the British Government’s. News bulletins
cover Darfur, Zimbabwe, Somalia, all the disaster zones, he said.
“Then you come to the do-gooders. And the problem with Comic Relief, Oxfam,
all those good people whom I really admire and thank for their efforts, is
that if they wage a campaign to raise funds to deal with a problem, what
image is it going to show you? Starving kids. Camps. Sick people. Because
how can they raise funds without it?”
Even he, he said, an African with huge corporate success in the continent, was
prone to think of stereotypical images when he said the word “Africa”: “I
get the sick child, because I am so brainwashed by watching so much
television.”
He said that Mr Brown tended to focus on poverty and disease when talking
about Africa, but when he talked about investment and trade he focused on
China and India. “If I have a chance to speak to him or to advise him, that
would be my advice. Focus on infrastructure and education . . . we also need
to tell people about how wonderful Africa is as a place for investment. You
can make money.”
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair both warmly endorsed Mr Ibrahim’s new venture, but
he has not had a chance to speak to Mr Brown, one to one. For a man so
committed to Africa, Mr Brown’s response to the award has been
underwhelming. His International Development Secretary, Douglas Alexander,
cannot make it to the award party, but Mr Ibrahim does not complain. “We do
not go and hassle people and stand outside offices. We just do our thing,”
he said.
Just as he did with BT, and with Celtel, and now with the future of Africa. It
may be time for our political leaders to buy shares in Mo Ibrahim, quickly.
The good, the bad, the corrupt
Joaquim Alberto Chissano
Overwhelming favourite and one of the few candidates respected
internationally. Became Mozambique’s second president in 1986 and stepped
down voluntarily in 2005, leaving the country politically stable and
economically stronger. Weakness: son accused of corruption and murdering
opponents
Benjamin William Mkapa
President of Tanzania from 1995 to 2005. He speeded up the liberalisation of
the economy and privatized most of state corporations. His pursuit of free
market policies also attracted foreign investment. Weakness: Lavish
spending. He spent £15 million on a private presidential jet, as well as
almost £30 million on “unnecessary” military aviation equipment
Domitien Ndayizeye
President of Burundi from April 2003 to August 2005. He deserves to be
included simply for agreeing to take on one of the world’s most dangerous
jobs and handing over power constitutionally. A Hutu, he tried to bridge the
gap between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsis and oversaw the
negotiation and implementation of a new constitution
Sam Nujoma
Ruled Namibia for 15 years as the country’s first and then only post
independence leader and he indisputably left it in good shape. When he
stepped down it was after peaceful elections. Weakness: courted by praising
the policies of President Mugabe of Zimbabwe and he has remained head of the
ruling party, SAWPO, leading to accusations of behind the scenes management
El-Hadj Bonfoh Abbass
Interim President of Togo from February to May 2005. He took over the country
after Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé, the son of the former president, resigned
over allegations of rigged elections. He was seen as a “chair-warmer”, but
unlike most African leaders he did not try to remain in the seat
The no hopers
Gnassingbe Eyadema
Undoubtedly the worst of the bad. The President of Togo died aged 69 in 2005
and was the last of the generation of African leaders who did everything to
cling on to power. Eyadema was, for his time, Africa’s longest-serving
ruler. Born to a peasant family in northern Togo, he seized power in 1967
after staging one of Africa’s first coups soon after Togo won independence.
He ruled for four decades
Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya
Seized power in Mauritania in 1984 and ruled to 2005, ignoring all calls to
turn the country into a democracy and respect of human rights. He continued
the tradition of previous governments of favouring the White Moorish
community over Black Moors and Black Africans. Any political unrest and
dissent was quashed by the military
Elson Bakili Muluzi
Was the president of Malawi from 1994 to 2004. He came to power after
defeating the country’s independence leader, Hastings Banda. He then
proposed an amendment to the constitution that would have allowed him to run
for a third term, but this was abandoned in the face of popular
demonstrations. His presidency was marred by controversy and scandal
Azali Assoumani
Seized power in Comoros after leading a coup in 1999. He won deeply flawed
multi-party elections in 2002 and quashed any movements towards secession by
other islands in the archipelago. Throughout his career he gave sanctuary to
mercenaries who were involved in toppling other African regimes, including
Bob Denard
— The other leaders competing for the Ibrahim prize are: Abdiqassim Salad
Hassan (Somalia) Mathieu Kerekou (Benin) Albert Rene (Seychelles) Henrique
Rosa (Guinea-Bissau)
