Mo Ibrahim On Africa’s Current Leadership

Sudanese-British billionaire entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim recently delivered a speech during the 11th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture on August 17, 2013, at the summit dedicated to the global peace icon….

In your lecture you asked, without mentioning Robert Mugabe by name, why an African country had just re-elected an 89-year-old as its president. Isn't it more worrying that the entire Southern African region has hailed his victory?

The problem is that we have a lopsided and superficial view about elections. Elections are a long process, starting from the people's freedom to form parties, their freedom of association and expression, to the production of a credible register of voters and the voting process itself.

But the world just focuses on the day of elections. [Former US president] Jimmy Carter arrives, the African Union sends observers, all those wonderful gentlemen go to the polling station and if there is nobody actually beating up the people we say: Oh, wonderful election. That is a very limited view of elections. In our [Mo Ibrahim Foundation] index on governance, we have stopped using the word "democracy"; we say "participation" because the word democracy is so abused. People have even won elections before polling day.

There are few fair and good elections in Africa. Is it time for the continent to come up with a new recipe for elections?

We have a major development on the continent: a tsunami of young people coming forward. People of our age are like dinosaurs, extinct. The young people coming forward are utterly different. They are armed with new communications gadgets, they talk to each other nonstop, it's impossible to keep information secret from them and that will include information about elections. I firmly believe we are moving forward to a much more open and well-connected society that will end a lot of corruption.

You are a British citizen and reside in London but you are originally from Sudan and you know Egypt well. If you had a magic wand, what would you do to solve the Egyptian crisis?

This is a terrible situation because people are unable to have a healthy dialogue. To be honest, [deposed president] Mohamed Morsi wasted an amazing opportunity to establish a new democratic era in Egypt. You have to remember he got only 25%-26% of the votes in the first round and in the rerun he needed the support of liberals, who backed him with some conditions, which he agreed to. He agreed to three vice-presidents (one Christian, one a woman and the third from the Muslim Brotherhood), he agreed to appoint an inclusive government, and he agreed to write a constitution with everyone.

Well, he reneged on all these promises and that is a problem. The Brotherhood decided that with 51% of the vote they could do anything they wanted and that is a very poor understanding of democracy. [Former president] Hosni Mubarak was elected but was removed by the military, and Morsi is now also removed by the military. This is a really unfortunate situation. The only way out is dialogue and it doesn't look like that is going to happen soon.

Your 2014 annual prize for African leadership, worth US$5m, is due to be announced in October. But in three of the first six years of its existence, the judges decided there was no ex-president worthy of receiving it. Isn't it time to rethink the award?

No. The prize plays an important part in what we do because it focuses everybody's mind about the issue of leadership and governance. The prize actually costs us much less money than the governance index. But everyone knows much more about the prize than the index. Why? Because the prize is sexy, it is money and about presidents and so on.

We say as long as this prize is helping to draw attention to good leadership, we are happy with that. From the outset we said we didn't expect to offer the prize every year, because it's not a pension. It's a prize for leaders who really came and changed things, with clean hands, and who left on time. We don't have many people in Africa who did that. So should we shoot the messenger?

Culled: Financial Mail