Skip to main content

Namibia President Wins $5 Million Prize for African Leadership

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation awarded its multimillion-dollar prize for African leaders who step down from power to Namibia’s departing president Monday—making him the first winner after two years in which no one was deemed worthy of award.
The prize committee said they chose Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba, who leaves office later this month, not only because he didn’t try to hold on to power, but because he welcomed political opposition, invested massively in the fight against AIDS and abolished school fees to make education free for Namibian children.
“We have heroes in Africa. It is not only Mandela,” said Mohamed ElBaradei , an Egyptian diplomat and member of the selection committee.
The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership is sought-after not just for its prestige but because it offers a lucrative retirement. It comes with $5 million over the first 10 years and then a yearly stipend of $200,000 for life. To win, a former head of state has to have been democratically elected, served only the constitutionally mandated term and demonstrated exceptional leadership. Only those who have left office in the last three years are considered.
The awarding of the 2014 prize comes as many were starting to wonder if the foundation had been overly optimistic about the possibility of finding qualified candidates.
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema have both ruled for decades. Meanwhile, the presidents of Burundi and Congo both have made moves in the past year suggesting they may be trying to extend their tenures beyond constitutional limits.
And for the past two years, the committee found no one to honor.
Asked about the difficulty finding candidates, the prize committee chairman said they are fine with going many years without giving the award because they are searching for people who are true role models for the continent.
“We are not giving an award simply for the sake of giving an award,” said Tanzanian diplomat Salim Ahmed Salim, the chairman.
Like many of Africa’s elder statesmen, Mr. Pohamba started as a rebel leader. But after independence in 1990 he took a ministerial post. He was first elected to the presidency in 2004 and served two terms—the maximum allowed by the constitution—before stepping aside for last year’s vote. During his time in office, Namibia has been peaceful but plagued by poverty despite large diamond and uranium reserves.
Mo Ibrahim—a British-Sudanese businessman who has become an African telecommunications magnate—created the prize in 2007. Many have described it as a sort of “democracy incentive”—a golden parachute offered to autocratic leaders who might otherwise be tempted to hang onto power for life.
But Mr. Salim said that those who win are seldom those who are seeking the prize. When he called Mr. Pohamba with the news, he said the president was surprised and “overwhelmed.”
Previous winners are Pedro de Verona Rodrigues Pires of Cape Verde, Festus Gontebanye Mogae of Botswana and Joaquim Alberto Chissano of Mozambique.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Qualcomm teases Snapdragon 820 while launching Sense ID fingerprint scanner

Qualcomm has announced a new fingerprint scanner destined for smartphones, called Sense ID , which uses ultrasonic sound waves to map the surface of your finger. Previous methods of fingerprint recognition used high-resolution capacitive sensors, but switching to ultrasonic sensors has a number of benefits. Firstly, these types of sensors are more accurate than their capacitive counterparts, as they're able to recognize the pores and ridges on your finger for increased security. They're also not as susceptible to moisture as previous sensors, and can work through glass, sapphire, plastic and even metal. Sense ID sensors will be compatible initially with Snapdragon 810 and 425 SoCs, although you'll eventually see them supported across the entire range of Snapdragon 400, 600 and 800 series SoCs.  As well as launching Sense ID, Qualcomm has teased their upcoming flagship SoC,  the Snapdragon 820 . Qualcomm has designed their own 64-bit capable ARMv8 cores for this SoC...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Take: Back to the future — Nasdaq 5000 circa 2015

The once-deflated Nasdaq has fully reflated. For the past 15 years, chatter about Nasdaq 5000 was mainly in the past tense, a historical remnant of the dot-com stock bubble era. But today, for the first time since March 2000, the Nasdaq composite — powered by Apple, the world's most valuable company and maker of the iPhone, and a fresh wave of innovation in social media, digital technology and biotech — is back above 5000 and very much alive in the current events debate. Way back when, on March 9, 2000, when the Internet was in diapers and investors were betting that the World Wide Web would be a moneymaking investment of epic proportions, the Nasdaq and its army of newly minted dot-com stocks skyrocketed to its first close above 5000, up an eye-popping 111% from a year earlier. At the time, "Nasdaq 5000" elicited a 1969 "man on the moon"-type awe from investors ranging from Wall Street titans to taxi drivers and hairdressers who viewed "Net stocks...
Post a Comment
Read more

GOOGLE IS PLANNING TO OFFER ITS OWN CELLULAR DATA NETWORK

BY  DANIELLE HOWE Move on over, traditional phone plans. Following weeks of rumors that it would introduce its own cell-data network,  Google  confirmed reports that it will be indeed taking on the endeavor.  The search-engine giant made the announcement at the wireless show in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday that it will sell data plans for smartphones and tablets in the next coming months. It hasn’t been revealed which wireless carrier would be hosting the Google service, but various reports suggest that Sprint and T-Mobile are the frontrunners. The move comes as a game changer for the wireless network market, though Google insists that its plan is not to become a huge competitor in that field. “We don’t intend to be a network operator at scale,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of products. “Our goal here is to drive a set of innovations which we think the ecosystem should evolve and hopefully will get traction.” The decision co...
Post a Comment
Read more