No Winner of 2009 African Leadership Prize
In a disturbing turn, the foundation set up by billionaire businessman and founder of CELTEL said its award committee reviewed several candidates, but could not find anyone worthy of the Prize set up to recognize good governance in Africa in 2009.
The award committee of the foundation which was launched in 2006 is chaired by former UN Secretary-General and Nobel laureate Kofi Annan. Members include fellow laureates: Graça Machel, widow of Samora Machel of Mozambique and third wife of former President Nelson Mandela; Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel laureate; as well as Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, another Nobel laureate.
Past winners of the Prize include Festus Mogae, the former president of Botswana; Joaquim Chissano, the former president of Mozambique; and Nelson Mandela, who was made an honorary laureate in recognition of his “extraordinary leadership qualities”. Ibrahim has responded in the past to critics of the prize that the continuous nature of the award gives African leaders the opportunity to continue in public service on their own terms after office.
Born in 1946, the Sudanese-British trans-national’s telecoms career had taken him to British Telecom (BT) and Cellnet (a BT subsidiary) before establishing a consultancy and software company in 1989. Waving aside all warnings, Ibrahim dared to set up a continent-wide mobile telephone operation in 1998 with an unusual corporate culture: the company refused to pay bribes. Ibrahim and his co-founders regarded this approach as a political and commercial litmus test for the African continent. Although the motivation for setting up CELTEL was not solely commercial, the Company became hugely successful. In 2005 Ibrahim sold CELTEL for $3.4 billion. Ibrahim was on TIME Magazine’s 100 list in 2008 & 2009 and Forbes lists Mo Ibrahim’s net worth in 2008 in the region of $2.5 billion.
“It is the prize committee’s decision not to award a prize this year and we entirely respect it. We made clear at the launch of the foundation that there may be years when there is no winner.” – Mo Ibrahim said. The Foundation’s award was designed to encourage good governance in Africa and to hand out the world’s largest annually awarded prize. The Ibrahim prize for achievement in African leadership is worth $5m over 10 years and $200,000 for life annually thereafter.
The foundation also publishes a quality of governance index which is a first step towards developing culturally appropriate parameters that rival the euro-centric World Bank indices.
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