Word: ibrahim
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...Monday, that achievement was recognized when the Mo Ibrahim Foundation awarded its annual good governance prize to Festus Mogae, who retired this year after two five-year terms as president. The prize achieved instant recognition when it was inaugurated last year because of its hefty cash incentive: $5 million over 10 years, $200,000 a year after that and an additional $200,000 a year for good causes espoused by the winner...
...contrast to Mugabe's murderous and inept kleptocracy could not be starker. But in conversation on Monday, Ibrahim insisted Mugabe, not Mogae, was increasingly the exception in Africa. Ibrahim is a Sudanese telecoms billionaire who decided to put his money where his mouth was after concluding that poor governance was the bane of the continent. "African leadership was a failure, and its own failure," he says. "You can't sit here and blame colonialism forever...
...Since launching his foundation, however, Ibrahim says he had been surprised to discover that his impressions were increasingly historic. "Ten or 20 years ago, the African archetype was an autocratic country, with one state television station, one state newspaper and one state radio broadcaster," says Ibrahim. "That's no longer the case. Suddenly civil society is active. There are thousands of young Africans who are educated and getting on with it. Everybody speaks to everybody now. People's lives are no longer a monopoly of the government...
...More evidence of Africa turning the corner came Monday, in the form of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation's finding that governance is improving in 31 out of 48 sub-Saharan African countries. Even more astonishing, the measure of good governance showing most improvement, on a continent notorious for tyrants and bloodshed, was human rights. "Obscured by many of the headlines of the past few months, the real story coming out of Africa is that governance performance across a large majority of African countries is improving," said Ibrahim, the billionaire boss of Celtel, a pan-African mobile phone giant...
...Ibrahim's experiences as an entrepreneur in Africa that convinced him to set up his foundation and create a $5 million annual prize for the African leader who best personifies responsible and credible government, which he saw as the key to African development. So why are things changing now? "[As] John Githongo [Kenya's former anticorruption czar] says, 'The democracy genie is out of the bottle,' " notes Hania Farhan, the foundation's director of research. "There will be violent ructions and eruptions, like Kenya or Zimbabwe or Nigeria, but the trend is there, and it is remarkable. Africans want their...