Revolutions, elections and money in the air

Editors Note

Africa taught the world a master class in revolution in 2011 with what has now come to be known as the Arab Spring.

It demonstrated the power of both the continent’s masses and its civil society with the revolutions that swept the Arab North. It was also the year when the continent’s potential for change shone brightly. Africa’s immense economic opportunities over which the Western world and the East desperately scramble, have become more evident, and the high number of democratic elections that took place suggests that there has been no despair in the quest for democracy.

The hopeful signs, however, should not blind anyone to the enormous challenges Africa faces — particularly the high price it pays for the lack of good leadership. While the continent had a record 19 elections, they were also an indicator of how easily progress can unravel. The 19 elections produced only seven newly elected leaders, and all the elections were marred by varying degrees of of irregularity.

Africa’s seeming inability to successfully transfer power without violence and mass controversy only points a finger at the poor, and often crooked, leadership which continues to plague the continent.

To compound the problem, the media is easily co-opted and controlled, making it quickly distrusted. Opposition groups are either fragmented or unwilling to participate in elections they know they will lose to state-sponsored rigging, and civil society’s opinion is often rendered redundant.

Nevertheless, there are a few gems. After a couple of years without a winner, the Mo Ibrahim Prize for good leadership was finally called back into action — Cape Verde’s former president, Pedro Pires, bagged the $5 million prize.

At Nation Media Group we feel we have a duty to the people of Africa to highlight the good, the bad and the ugly.

Our Africa project staffer, SAMANTHA SPOONER, has spent quite some time tracking reports of the political actions of Africa’s leaders in order to come up with our Second Annual African Leadership Scorecard.

With all the changes in government and revolutions, the 2011 index was going to be a tricky one. To maintain the broadness of the index, we continue to rely on a variety of measures to give a rounded evaluation of the leaders’ performance; the Mo Ibrahim Index of African governance, the Democracy Index, Freedom House’s Press Freedom Index, Transparency International’s Corruption Index and the United Nation’s Human Development Index. We then developed a Nation Media Group Index to complement the others that we chose. The final score on which the political leaders are judged is an average score of all these indices.

The Human Development Index was generally more positive in 2011. Also noteworthy is that although a large middle class is emerging in Africa, restrictions on freedom remain in place.

Finally, countries’ score for the year in review were heavily influenced by the Freedom of the Press Index and the Corruption Index. A strong bias in favour of media freedom and against corruption, means that there was a general downward negative trend in the 2011 results, compared with 2011 as governments were more controlling of the media – perhaps spooked by the Arab Spring.

Our methodology for the leaders’ scorecard

Leaders’ grades were derived from how they placed in five respected international indices of governance, plus the new NMG Political Index that we developed. Their scores in these indices were weighted, then combined to produce a score on a scale of 0-100. The best governors placed closest to 100, and the worst closest to 0. The scorecard heavily rewards consistency. If an African leader scores very highly in one or two areas, but poorly in the rest, he/she will end up with a dismal overall grade. A consistent score across the board, on the other hand, will place him/her highly in the overall standings. This is how the indices are weighted.

Mo Ibrahim Index – 15 per cent