Margaret McElligott
26 October 2006
interview
Washington, DC — Celtel founder Mo Ibrahim told AllAfrica about his groundbreaking $5 million prize for African leadership, the largest award in the world. Excerpts:
The leadership prize is a prize in recognition of achievement. We are challenging the African leaders to really get to grips with the very complicated issues facing them. It is very challenging to run a country where you have a lot of people in the poverty trap. You have health issues: malaria, Aids, etc. You have a young population that needs education. You need to build your infrastructure. You need to build your agriculture, your industrial base. So much needs to be done, and we think that the brilliant leaders who really manage to lead their countries out of the poverty trap ought to be recognized and applauded, because the task is just too big. That is one objective of the prize.
The second objective is we really want to raise the issue of governance and leadership. It is a very important subject and it is not receiving enough attention from anybody. It is crucial. Without good leadership and good governance, I don't think we can execute the tasks we need to deal with in Africa. We are recipients of aid now and we thank the donor countries for this, and the generous people who are helping, but we really need to get out of that situation to stand on our feet, and that will require a greater effort in development and that requires leadership. What is leadership, really? It is delivering to your people the essential requirements. We need to articulate these essential requirements. We need to measure achievements. Good governance, we believe, is measurable and we need to develop the tools to measure it. We need to publish that to everybody to have access so people know who is doing what. I think it's important that the citizens of Africa take the leaders to account. What has been delivered to them as stakeholders, they need to know it. Based on that objective measurement, people really can decide who are the leaders that managed to take us forward.
The third one is to also tell people there is life after office. We need to enable people to have life after office, life in service of civil society. That's very important. We look at people like President Clinton, what's he doing right now. A lot of people think it is wonderful. He is a young president who left office and he did not go to the swimming pool. He is running around, dealing with complex issues for humanity, and that is wonderful. Everybody applauds that. It is not only Democrats or Republicans. Everybody. This is a wonderful life after office. We would love our leaders to have a life after office and we want them to get involved in civil society, so they can do a lot of good things there. The prize is meant to hold those successful leaders to really engage civil society.
Some people may perceive this as a sort of pension.
We are not putting this out as a department of pensions. It is a reward for the leaders who really managed to deliver to their people. Number two, the objective is to have a debate about governance, which we are having right now. Without the prize we would not have talked about it, maybe. The third is to enable retiring presidents not to go to pension, sitting by the swimming pool, but to engage in the civil society and to really play the role.
You don't have to have an office to be useful. We can do a lot of things out of office. You don't need the power of the office to do things. Civil society is so rich. We need to get engaged there. We need the president to go talk to school kids, tell them what it means to be president. What does it mean to make hard decisions? How did they make it themselves? What does it mean to be a good citizen? We need to take up the cause of women in Africa, tackling issues like rape. We have a lot of rapes in Africa. Why is that? [We have] issues of conflict: tribal, ethnic problems. [Leaders should] be a voice for progress, for equality, etc., for all those wonderful values we hope to prevail in our society. They can do that role. We will help them to do that, I hope.
You've been described as having an entrepreneur's common sense, since you got your formal training in engineering instead of business. It sounds like you're bringing that same attitude to the question of governance.
I hope so. We have been consulting and talking to many, many people in all walks of life. We talk to presidents, to people in the World Bank, to people at the United Nations, to people at NGOs, to captains of industry, to academics, to young people: we tested this with a lot of people. Everybody says, "What? Why did we not think of this before?" It really makes common sense and I hope it is right. We will see. But what is important is that we are not afraid. We have an idea. We think it is a good idea. We'll go out and try it. We hope we succeed. You cannot sit back and do nothing.
How did you decide to team up with Prof. Robert Rotberg and Harvard?
As a board, we decided that we need to develop an index for good governance and good leadership, and that index should be based in scientific facts, not on liking or disliking. Today we argue, do you like Mugabe or do you not like Mugabe? Do like this guy, [or] don't you like this guy? There is too much passion in the discussion. Look, let us take the prejudice, the passion out of this. What is a leader supposed to do for his people? He's supposed to improve the standard of living, to help them get jobs, get kids to schools, [and have] enough medicine and hospitals. We can quantify what is needed and we can measure it. That's why we decided to look for an academic center to work with us in producing the index. We found that Rotberg and Kennedy School of Government really are doing a lot of work in the area of governance and measurements of governance. That's why we decided that Bob and Harvard would be a useful starting point.
We needed also to have credible people. Whatever we want to do, we need to do things right and correctly. Our people communicated with UN people (working on the Human Development Index) and the World Bank (for economic data), and we agreed to coordinate. We are not trying to replace the wheel. We are not trying to replace any organization. We are adding value to whatever is there, and that is the way to work. We are putting a team in the center to produce that index so we can quantify, you can measure, and then it becomes much easier and much more objective for the committee to select.
How will the committee select, since the index is based on countries, but the prize is given to individuals?
It is based on year-to-year of what is happening. The period of the president or the leader will be projected on top of that, so it is very easy. You lead a country: you come to power in 2004, you leave in 2008. All that we need is to see what was the performance of the country when you took power, [and] what was the performance of the country when you left power? We need to produce the curves and the percentage growth in various areas, and we measure the slope of this growth. It's a very scientific process and it can be measured. We understand there will always be elements: a tsunami hits a country or a disaster which can affect something, but that's why the committee will use its judgment. It's not automatic.
When will the foundation award the first prize?
We think the work will start to take shape probably by the summer next year and maybe this year we'll be in a position that the foundation will offer its first prize.
So sometime after next summer?
Yes, I hope so.
How often will the prize be awarded?
It's an annual prize.
In terms of the foundation's endowment, how much are you planning on spending? With new ex-presidents being added every year, this is quite a large amount of money for each individual, but it's an enormous amount of money for the foundation altogether.
Yes, but I have put all my proceeds and wealth behind this. We produce our financial models for this and based on an assumption that the span of life for a president after office is probably on average 25 years, which is a reasonable number, we must do the financial projection, and we put in place enough funding to deal with that. We are fully funded. We are not seeking money from anybody, because we also have to be careful here. I'm no longer involved in big business, because big business should not be involved in this. We talk about governance, so government should not be involved in this. This can only be done, really, by a private African citizen. And that's what we're doing. That's why I had to come up with all the financial guarantees and money to put in place to go ahead with that. And that's been done.
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