Mozambique wins again!

The local South Africans have all been trying to tell me about rugby. There seems to have been some kind of big match recently.

Of course the big topic of conversation for everyone else here this week has been the award of the inaugural Mo Ibrahim Foundation prize for achievement in African leadership to our ex-President Joaquim Chissano. The first thing we should all do in thinking about this is to set aside cynicism for a minute and give his ex-excellency a round of applause for behaving well where many people - including a lot of wealthy, educated and powerful Westerners - would have let him get away with behaving badly. News of the award must have given him a much-needed filip: when Kofi Annan announced it in London, Chissano was in the backblocks of Uganda, waiting for a notorious warlord who failed to turn up for scheduled discussions about a peace process.

I'd better summarise Chissano's claims to such an award, because I have no idea how this is being reported in the Western media, if it's been noticed at all. ("Who? From where? And what the blazes is governance? Nah, show that Mugabe clip - everyone likes thugs.") When I first learned of this I was told he received it just for leaving office gracefully, but after researching the award a little I was relieved to discover it was more for his overall career as President and after: he presided over a largely successful peace process at the end of the War of Destabilisation; he moved Mozambique from a one-party state to multi-party democracy; he abandoned the centrally planned economy in favour of more or less free markets (as a newly converted banker I think this is a virtue, though I accept that some may disagree); and since his polite and bloodless departure from office he has made use of his moral capital in efforts to bring about peace in northern Uganda and southern Sudan.

The upshot of most of the talk round here is that Chissano deserves the accolade, but the millions attached it could be put to better use. A lot of the cynicism I've heard about this award focuses on the notion that the millions are supposed to motivate the present generation of African leaders to behave better. I entirely agree with those critics that the prize isn't enough to tempt those politicians only motivated by money, and those politicians who aren't will act for the greater good whether or not there's a prize waiting for them afterwards. The composition of the panel choosing the recipient - which is heavy on Western bigwigs, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - rouses uncomfortable images of foreigners deciding what's best for Africa and patting the heads of Africans who comply with externally imposed standards. Some might find it embarrassing that African leaders can earn a rich prize by doing what leaders in the rest of world do as a matter of course. There are also reservations about rewarding only the leader when his behaviour depends so much on the behaviour of so many around him.

It occurs to me, though, that the prize makes much more sense when you stop thinking of what it's supposed to do for Africa and consider instead what it's supposed to do outside Africa. I recently read The State Of Africa by Martin Meredith, a history of Africa since the era of independence started in the 1950s. Mozambique hardly gets mentioned - which is to Mozambique's credit, as Meredith focuses on bad news. Mozambican governments have made bad mistakes, but haven't produced crazy dictators, or used ethnic violence to entrench their power, or stripped the country of natural assets to fill Swiss bank accounts (though I'm not saying there are no Swiss bank accounts at all). All these things are African phenomena and have to be studied and explained - and, yes, reported in the media. But they don't get changed without showing examples of how things could happen differently. Part of the problem of corruption in Africa is that Western businesses and other organisations come in with bundles of money and start bestowing patronage. If asked why, they'd answer that it's how you do things in Africa. I suspect that a large component of what Mo Ibrahim is trying to achieve with this prize is to show that it's not necessarily how you do things in Africa; that negative stereotypes are just that; that there are some good things happening. I understand Ibrahim to be a Sudanese businessman living in the UK; the stereotypes must annoy him more than they annoy me, and that's a lot. Even the millions make sense in this context - more likely to get headlines.

Having said that, I'm not very hopeful that it can do much against the barrage of negative images. I still think it's a worthy endeavour, though I hope there's some provision to withhold the award when there are no deserving candidates in any given year. Nor am I sure how it might strengthen Chissano in his work in Uganda, but I hope it does.