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Former Mozambique President Wins Leadership Prize
Real estate news By Craig Timberg
Monday, October 22, 2007; 5:07 PM
Former Mozambique president Joaquim Chissano on Monday won a $5 million leadership prize that promoters hope will encourage other African heads of state to rule wisely, without overstaying their welcomes. Chissano, who turned 68 on Monday, helped bring "peace, reconciliation, stable democracy and economic progress to his country," former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, who headed the prize committee for the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, said during a ceremony in London.
In 2004, Chissano stepped down at a time when political analysts said he could have won another five-year term. And although Mozambique remains poor and corrupt, he is seen as having led it through a treacherous era by ending a 16-year-long civil war and overseeing the transition to democracy. Mo Ibrahim, a British telecommunications tycoon born in Sudan, created and endowed the Achievement in African Leadership award to recognize good governance on a beleaguered continent, but he did not participate in the selection of Chissano. That job fell to a six-person committee led by Annan.
Only former African leaders were eligible for the prize, which organizers billed as the world's largest cash award. The Nobel Peace Prize pays $1.5 million. "We Africans, it's our duty to look after our own people," Ibrahim said by phone from London. "This hopefully will help galvanize the debate. . . . It focuses people's minds on how importance governance is." In many African nations, such as Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, legacies of conflict and poor political leadership have left their citizens impoverished. Better-governed nations such as South Africa, Botswana and Ghana have outperformed their neighbors in most measures of development.
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