Lagos — One thing the Bank PHB powered African Voices on CNN is achieving across the continent and indeed the world over is the ability of the producers to give everyone a sense of belonging without diluting the quality of personalities that feature on the show.

Imagine how excited Senegalese, Malians and Ethiopians would have been last weekend when the programme featured Ousmane Sembene, Abderrahmane Sissako and Haile Gerima. This weekend the zoom lens of CNN's first ever personality based documentary series on Africans is focusing on Sudan, Mo Ibrahim a man whose heart to give has earned him more fame than his stupendous fortune.

The expose is instructive for men of means in our clime whose idea of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility is skewed towards self-seeking government patronage.

IN 1998, as the telecoms boom was under way, Mo Ibrahim was amazed that big companies were rushing into the mobile-phone business around the world, yet not in Africa. There they saw only problems: poverty, unrest and corruption. Mr. Ibrahim, a veteran of the telecoms industry in Britain and Sudan, was at the time running a consultancy he had founded in London. Amid the cigar smoke and snifters that followed its directors' dinners, an idea formed. Might it be possible to set up a pan-African mobile operator--and to do so without paying bribes?

This was the genesis of Celtel, which is now one of Africa's largest mobile operators, with some 20m subscribers in 15 countries. When Mr. Ibrahim sold Celtel in 2005 to MTC, a Kuwaiti operator, for $3.4 billion, it demonstrated that the continent was open for business. Rather than charity, he insists, "the way forward for Africa is investment."

Building businesses in Africa is important to Mr. Ibrahim, who had to leave the continent as a young man in order to pursue his career. Born in Sudan and raised and educated in Egypt, he started off as an engineer at Sudan's national phone company. After further study in Britain he went on to become technical director at Cellnet, the wireless arm of BT, Britain's biggest telecoms operator. (Cellnet was subsequently sold, renamed O2 and is now owned by Telefónica of Spain.) He left in 1989 to set up an engineering consultancy that designed mobile networks, and sold the firm for just over $900m to Marconi in 2000.

These experiences paved the way for Celtel's emergence. The consultancy enabled Mr. Ibrahim to peer into the business models of dozens of mobile operators, from which he concluded that an African operator would work. His time at BT was also informative: big companies, he says, teach a fellow everything he ought not to do in order to be successful. "Later on in life I was not worried about taking on the big guys, because you know they are not efficient," he says. And Mr Ibrahim's previous success meant that the motivation behind Celtel's establishment was not solely commercial. He and his co-founders had already made their fortunes and regarded Celtel as a political and intellectual test. That is why they happily ventured into risky African markets and refused to pay bribes.

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation

Perhaps one of the most indelible marks, which this remarkable entrepreneur is leaving for posterity in the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. The Foundation amongst other things aims at encouraging good leadership and governance across Africa by providing objective criteria by which citizens can hold their Governments to account.

In 2006, the foundation launched the Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. The prize is awarded to African heads of state who deliver security, health, education and economic development to their constituents, and who democratically transfer power to their successor. According to Ibrahim, "Good governance is crucial." With a $5 million initial payment, plus $200,000 a year for life, the prize is believed to be the world's largest, exceeding the $1.3m Nobel Peace Prize.

The inaugural Prize was awarded to former president Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, for "his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy. Festus Mogae won the 2008 Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, and received US$ 5 million over 10 years and US$ 200,000 annually for life thereafter.

Former South African President Nelson Mandela, former United States President Bill Clinton, and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan are among those who have welcomed the initiative.

Other Interests

Mr. Ibrahim has also put up $150m to establish a fund to invest in African businesses. From its newly opened offices in London, the Africa Enterprise Fund will seek out promising companies in financial services, consumer goods, energy and agricultural processing. The aim is to focus on established businesses that need cash and experienced management to grow, and the average investment is expected to be around $20m. Only companies that can expand their operations regionally or throughout Africa will be considered. Mr. Ibrahim has appointed Tsega Gebreyes, Celtel's former strategy chief, to help run the fund. This is because the fund's approach is to apply the Celtel formula in other fields: identify inefficiencies, consolidate fragmented operations, go pan-continental and develop a respected brand. The goal is scale. A large company that operates in several African markets can attract a higher calibre of managers than a gaggle of local ones, and can have more political clout when demands for bribes crop up.

Politics, Philosophy and Economics

Though there are no direct links between the foundation and the fund, the two are symbiotic. Business and investment in Africa can succeed only if there is good governance, which is what the foundation is intended to promote. And economic development is necessary in turn to give people a stake in improving the political process. The foundation's $5m prize is a pittance, it is true, when compared with the spoils that can be extracted by staying in power. But the initiative may not be totally futile: given the impotence of Africa's intergovernmental bodies it will do no harm at all to produce an annual public ranking of African governance. And the foundation will offer a carrot where other non-governmental organizations carry sticks.

The investment fund is also tiny when set against the magnitude of Africa's problems. But as Celtel shows, some businesses can have a powerful ripple effect, promoting economic activity and generating new investment. Celtel employs around 8,000 people directly, for example, but it and other mobile operators indirectly provide jobs to around 170,000 people in Africa who resell prepaid airtime. More broadly, mobile phones also promote entrepreneurship and economic activity by widening access to markets and making up for poor or non-existent transport infrastructure. Similar ripple effects ought to be possible in other fields such as financial services and energy.

Thirty years ago Mr. Ibrahim had to leave Africa for Europe in search of education and professional success. He hopes that fostering indigenous African companies will help ensure that tomorrow's engineers and entrepreneurs can find their opportunities closer to home.

Once a Marxist

For a man who describes himself as a "former Marxist", Mo Ibrahim has clearly made his peace with the forces of capitalism. The chairman of the fastest-growing mobile phone group in sub-Saharan African talks with relish of breaking down the Arab business world's wariness towards his continent, of cell phones making the internet virtually redundant. Few inventions can boast as dramatic an impact on society as the mobile phone in Africa. Embraced there long before it became commonplace in the west, the technology allows Africans to communicate in spite of fraying landlines, and from areas that colonial-era networks never reached.

Brainwave

Mo Ibrahim developed his brainwave and interest in telecommunications in 1969 in a rather strange way. Rushing to a screening of Charlton Heston's epic Khartoum, he jumped into a taxi and became intrigued by the cab radio. "'How are you communicating?' He asked the driver. 'How does the signal reach the car without direct line of sight?'" This question became the focus of several degrees, and Ibrahim then joined BT, where he played a part establishing Britain's first mobile network, before setting up an international consultancy firm. But Africa remained his passion, and he was appalled at the assumption among potential investors that the continent was a place where contracts would not be respected.

Post Mortem

We hear ardent viewers of the programme are beginning to feel uncomfortable because the growing list of personalities featured on the show does not include a Nigerian so far. Despite Bank PHB's vision of becoming Africa's Integrated Bank, it is still a Nigerian company and he who pays the piper dictates the tune. Grapevine information at our disposal has it that the wait wont be for too long. It is also clearly not an indication of the scarcity of iconic Nigerians worthy recognition on the show. Good thing is, the wait will be well worth the while. African Voices airs on CNN every Saturday at 12.30pm and 7.30pm with a repeat broadcast at on Sunday by 6.00pm