Sudanese tycoon funds African good governance prize

Oct 26, 2006 (LONDON) — A Sudanese self-made multi-millionaire will today announce an ambitious project to foster good governance in Africa by offering a huge cash prize to entice leaders tempted to cling to power to leave office, the Financial Times reported. .

Mo Ibrahim, who last year sold Cel Tel, his pan-African telecommunications company, to MTC of Kuwait for $3.4bn, will use a high profile event at a London hotel tonight to launch what he hopes will be a race between African heads of state to claim the $5m annual award by delivering security, health, education and economic development to their people.

While departing western leaders are welcomed into
boardrooms and the lecture circuit, “our guys have no life after office”, Mr Ibrahim said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Suddenly, all the mansions, cars, food, wine is withdrawn. Some find it difficult to rent a house in the capital. That incites corruption; it incites people to cling to power. The prize will offer essentially good people who may be wavering, the chance to opt for the good life after office.”

Backers of the prize said it would offer a graceful exit from government for the likes of Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda – leaders once hailed as models of modern African governance but whose reputations have subsequently suffered as they rolled back democracy to remain in power.

But critics said the money would be better spent bolstering social and political grassroots movements.

Teddy Brett, senior visiting fellow in developing studies at the London School of Economics, said: “The problem is the corruption of the top levels of the ruling class. Giving $5m to the least corrupt of them is not going to improve it much.”

The award, consisting of 10 yearly payments of $500,000, a life pension thereafter and an optional further $200,000 a year for projects, will be made yearly by a committee appointed by the board of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to a head of government in one of 44 sub-Saharan countries. The prize is conditional on the leader having relinquished power. Mr Ibrahim has invited Kofi Annan, outgoing UN secretary-general, to chair the committee, and expects him to accept.

The judges’ decision will be informed – but not bound – by a governance league table devised by Robert Rotberg, public policy lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, based on some 50 variables but weighted towards delivering economic development and security.

Mr Ibrahim will also join Nasser Al-Khurafi, majority shareholder of MTC, to establish the Kuwaiti Sudanese Holding Company to invest $110m in war-torn Sudan. He said he hoped to demonstrate to his associates in the Gulf that Africa was not a “black hole” but a continent where ethical investments could reap high returns. “I tell them there’s trillions of dollars sitting [in the Gulf] earning next to nothing. Across the Red Sea, there are huge opportunities in agriculture, real estate, energy, mining,” he said.

(Financial Times)