Once when flying over Kenya I looked out of my window. The country was so lush, so green, I wondered how the people there could ever be hungry. Looking at the spaces, huge, endless spaces, animals, water; everything was there. I came to the conclusion that unless you are ruled properly, you cannot move forward. Everything else is second. Everything.
This was when I was still the chairman of Celtel International, the telecommunications company I founded less than 10 years ago. Celtel established a mobile phone network in Africa at a time when investors told me that there was no market for mobile phones there. The continent now boasts the fastest rate of mobile telephone growth in the world.
After the sale of Celtel, I really wanted to give the money back, and I had a number of choices – to go and buy masses of blankets and baby milk or to go into Darfur or Congo. That would have been very nice actually, but it's just like an aspirin: it doesn't deal with the problem. What I wanted to do was to look for a way to prevent further Darfurs, further failed states – and the answer is governance. We need to have good governance.
And so I set up my foundation. We have two core activities, publishing an annual index on the quality of governance in every African country and conferring the world's largest individual award to a former African leader. Although it is the award of the prize – the announcement of which is due to take place tomorrow – that has captured people's imaginations, it is really the index and our work in promoting and stimulating debate around the governance agenda that is the core of what we do.
I have faced some criticism, with people suggesting I am trying to bribe leaders to do their jobs, and therefore patronising them, to others asking me why I have not spent the money on bed nets and boreholes. The critics are failing to take into account how central governance and leadership are for Africa's development. In addition, western leaders have a future after their time in office – they can sit on the boards of companies, take up speaking engagements or write memoirs. But what do decent, hard-working African leaders have to look forward to once they retire? This is part of the importance of our prize. It provides African leaders with the option of continuing a life in public service.
Even if you do agree about the centrality of governance, how to improve it, even define it can be contentious questions. We wanted to take the prejudice, the passion out of this. What is a government supposed to do for its people? To improve the standard of living, to help them get jobs, get kids to schools, and have access to medicine and hospitals. Government may not directly provide these public goods and services, but government must be accountable for whether or not they are delivered to citizens. These issues are all quantifiable, measurable. And this is exactly what the Ibrahim Index of African Governance does. This month, in Cape Town, we launched the 2009 edition of the index. By taking a comprehensive look at the state of governance across the continent, we provided an in-depth view of government successes and failures. We found tangible ways to measure rights, participation, economics and social protection, particularly in relation to how these issues impact people's lives. Information like this empowers people to demand more from their governments.
To be used effectively, this information has to be given to the people who need it most – citizens, civil society groups, business leaders and politicians. The foundation is committed to a programme of dissemination, which includes ads in newspapers, radio features and engagement with thinktanks and universities across Africa.
Interestingly, through our efforts to place a newspaper advertisement in every country in Africa, we find a number of countries which refuse to publish our findings. This censorship, either imposed by the state or self-imposed, tells an important story in itself.
An even bigger challenge to the index is that there is so little data available across important areas. To take just one example, poverty data for the majority of sub-Saharan Africa is non-existent, extremely patchy or completely out-of-date. Reliable poverty data for Malawi dates from 1998 and for Niger from 1993. This lack of data raises real concerns about the efforts by the international community to meet the Millennium Development Goal to halve poverty by 2015. One wonders how policymakers have any idea whether they are meeting their targets. It is like a pilot flying a plane with no instruments.
Ultimately, both the index and the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, the $5m prize we award to former African leaders, are about improving the lives of Africans through better governance and excellence in leadership. They applaud success where it exists and call out failures when they occur. Too often we have failed to champion success and allowed slips in governance go by without condemnation. Recent events in Guinea stand as an obvious example. When Captain Moussa Dadis Camara came to power, too many thought he would hold to his promise to stand down, introduce democratic elections and restore the rule of law. Instead, the democratic process has been subverted and innocent lives have been lost. As Africans, we must put an end to the notion that abuses can be justified for the sake of wider stability. Real stability can only ever be achieved through democracy and the rule of law.
Failure of governance should not be seen as representative of the continent. The award of the prize for African leadership, to Festus Mogae of Botswana and Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique in 2008 and 2007 respectively, is proof of the visionary leadership that exists. The foundation wants to help restore proper balance to perceptions of Africa, showing the world that our continent is as much about Mandela as it is Mobutu.