A change is in two forms:positive and negative.Unrealistic policy will bring a negative change.Do not deceive Ghanaians.Think about the number of years you will take to realise these policies.Talking, Talking and Talking.
A change is in two forms:positive and negative.Unrealistic policy will bring a negative change.Do not deceive Ghanaians.Think about the number of years you will take to realise these policies.Talking, Talking and Talking.
aikins 7 years ago
The most stupid article.
The most stupid article.
$AINT GHFUO, BLACK EXCELLENCE! 7 years ago
NANA AKUFFU ADDO'S LEGACY: 1. MOVE THE CAPITAL AWAY FROM DIRTY ACCRA. 2. WE NEED STREET NAMES, NUMBERED BUILDINGS, VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL STREETS AND POSTAL CODES FOR ALL CONSTITUENCIES N DISTRICTS. THIS WILL ENSURE EFFICIEN ... read full comment
NANA AKUFFU ADDO'S LEGACY: 1. MOVE THE CAPITAL AWAY FROM DIRTY ACCRA. 2. WE NEED STREET NAMES, NUMBERED BUILDINGS, VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL STREETS AND POSTAL CODES FOR ALL CONSTITUENCIES N DISTRICTS. THIS WILL ENSURE EFFICIENT GOVERNANCE AND THIS WILL BE NANA ADDO'S LEGACY. 3. WE NEED 4YRS SHS. 4. REVERT NDC'S CREATE LOOT N SHARE TECHNICAL UNIVERSITIES BACK TO POLY AND HAVE SIMILAR CURRICULUM LIKE WE HAVE WITH COMMUNITY COLLEGES IN NORTH AMERICA. 5. GET RID OFF NYANTAKYI N SANITIZE GFA. 6. RENAME THE AIRPORT KWAME NKRUMAH INTL. AIRPORT. 7 AIR GHANA 8. STADIUMS WITH TERTAN TRACKS IN EACH REGIONAL CAPITAL. 9.FREE EDUCATION, FREE NHIS, FREE SCH FEEDING. 10 FACTORIES. 11 RAILWAY LINES 12. COVER ALL OPEN GUTTER AND CONTRUCT MAN HOLES AND PROPER DRAINAGE SYSTEMS. 13. ROAD SIGNS, STREET LIGHTS AND SPEEDING LIMIT SIGNS 14. ALL CITY MAYORS MUST BE VOTED FOR 15. REDUCE TAXES N JUMP RATES TO SPUR MORE PRIVATE SECTOR BORROWING N SPENDING 16. MORE EXPORTS, LESS IMPORTS 17. ROBUST GH STOCK EXCHANGE 18. APPEND/REVISE THE CONSTITUTION 18. REDUCE BSTARS BONUSES TO $5000 FOR WINS, $2500 FOR DRAWS AND $500 FOR LOSS RESULTS =MONEY. 19. WOYOME MUST RETURN THE LOOT 20. CHURCHES MUST PAY TAXES
Jury 7 years ago
Forget it!,
just make it short & easy for him, wai,
THE FOLLOWING MUST BE NANA'S 5 TOP PRIORTIES:
1> fresh water for entire Ghana
2> health post & centres in every village in Ghana,
3> power & energy supply: lights eve ... read full comment
Forget it!,
just make it short & easy for him, wai,
THE FOLLOWING MUST BE NANA'S 5 TOP PRIORTIES:
1> fresh water for entire Ghana
2> health post & centres in every village in Ghana,
3> power & energy supply: lights everywhere in Ghana,
4> free school in every village
5> infrastructure: tarred roads everywhere in Ghana with creation of jobs.
Don't ask too much to let this 'olu' to be pressured to his early grave, wate (you hear?)
The 5 priorties above alone is even enough which can make him a president for life,
These 5 priorties are the basic social needs of entire Ghanaians of which no president could've accomplished since from our Independence in 1957!!!
Kojo T 7 years ago
These are prophecies of "Prophet" Francis Kwarteng . There is no need for insults but patience .
These are prophecies of "Prophet" Francis Kwarteng . There is no need for insults but patience .
ASEMPA 7 years ago
Kwarteng Francis, you have the liberty to write your nonsense to any volumes you desire till Thy Kingdom Come. His Excellency President - Elect Akuffo Addo will surely be President from January 7 and you can go burn the Atlan ... read full comment
Kwarteng Francis, you have the liberty to write your nonsense to any volumes you desire till Thy Kingdom Come. His Excellency President - Elect Akuffo Addo will surely be President from January 7 and you can go burn the Atlantic Ocean. Your stupidity contributed immensely to the disgraceful defeat of JM. You are indeed very bitter and wounded. Go hang yourself, SORE LOSERS. Mahama and the NDC paid you with taxpayers money for this stupid job. Why wont you go to opposition?
Baba Farouk, PhD. 7 years ago
Seriously, what is this writer who called himself Francis Kwarteng trying hard to achieve with these incoherent series of writings? I believe I'm well-read and more educated than he may be, but I don't really understand his a ... read full comment
Seriously, what is this writer who called himself Francis Kwarteng trying hard to achieve with these incoherent series of writings? I believe I'm well-read and more educated than he may be, but I don't really understand his articles whenever I decided to read some of them. They don't make damn sense. Can somebody advises him to write in more coherent terms without using unrelated thoughts/analyses?
Village Lass 7 years ago
My sentiments exactly!!
My sentiments exactly!!
Nii Saban 7 years ago
Mr. Kwarteng, in one of your spectacularly incoherent pieces, I was charitable enough to advise you to invest some time in studying the rules of paragraphing and coherent writing, to which you retorted, rather absurdly, that ... read full comment
Mr. Kwarteng, in one of your spectacularly incoherent pieces, I was charitable enough to advise you to invest some time in studying the rules of paragraphing and coherent writing, to which you retorted, rather absurdly, that you make your own rules when you write; and in this piece also, of course, your insufferably deviant self is on full display! What a shame! Sir, your dogmatic insistence on inventing your own writing rules renders your articles 'thoroughly' unintelligible, if not arrantly and overtly nonsensical!
BTW, the above sentiments notwithstanding, there is one bright motif in all your witless doggerels--your undisguised hatred of Mr. Akuffo-Addo. What at all has that man done to merit your diseased utterances? A case in point: "President-elect Akufo-Addo has not been sworn in yet and already some greasy sympathizers of the NPP are moving the goalposts to suit the presidency of Akufo-Addo in the event that he does not deliver on his Elysian political promises, a most likely eventuality—if we should add. Call it post-factual or post-truth politics."
Who are you to assert that the man's presidency will be a failure? What well-researched facts and scrupulously-reasoned indices have you marshaled to support your jaundiced claim? Elections are won or lost. On two occasions the man lost to your candidates. This time he has won. Why won't you give the man the space and the benefit of the doubt to assume office and attempt to honor his campaign promises and pledges?
Sir, your candidate lost this time; PLEASE LEAVE THE WINNER ALONE!!
Obibs 7 years ago
Nii Saban, you are such a refined specimen. Others wouldn't have your temperament in responding to Francis Kwarteng, if that really is his name. I wouldn't be so charitable to his dribble.
Nii Saban, you are such a refined specimen. Others wouldn't have your temperament in responding to Francis Kwarteng, if that really is his name. I wouldn't be so charitable to his dribble.
Asante all the way 7 years ago
So what. I am waiting for my $1 million for K.E.E.A, my free school, my dam for my Village, free healthcare, free house, free free wife if possible, my factory for my Village. However, did UP/NPP got somebody for the thank yo ... read full comment
So what. I am waiting for my $1 million for K.E.E.A, my free school, my dam for my Village, free healthcare, free house, free free wife if possible, my factory for my Village. However, did UP/NPP got somebody for the thank you service to Atoa Niama or not? or they used that Fante guy who die in a hotel for the thank you service or not?
Obibs 7 years ago
What a load of rubbish from a sore loser..
What a load of rubbish from a sore loser..
Wo Nua 7 years ago
Go to your Togo with your Treatise of Doom!!! We know that...
G-od
H-as
A-nointed
N-ana
A-ddo!!!
Nana will succeed with God on his side!
Go to your Togo with your Treatise of Doom!!! We know that...
G-od
H-as
A-nointed
N-ana
A-ddo!!!
Nana will succeed with God on his side!
Nii Teiko 7 years ago
It has come to our notice that students are running away from his class. This may mean, among other things, that he has lost touch with the student body for lack of professionalism. And in America the no nonsense faculty boa ... read full comment
It has come to our notice that students are running away from his class. This may mean, among other things, that he has lost touch with the student body for lack of professionalism. And in America the no nonsense faculty board may replace, and throw him out of the window to pave way for a more serious and competent prof to take over come the next Spring Academic cycle. Yes, that is what get when you spend all your time writing nonsense to please Mahatma and his loot and share Criminals.
Nii Saban 7 years ago
Nii Teiko, I can bet my last dime that Kwarteng is not a professor of anything. In fact, his writings depict somebody who may inexorably be trudging down the stages of mental atrophy.
Just undertake a cursory reading of th ... read full comment
Nii Teiko, I can bet my last dime that Kwarteng is not a professor of anything. In fact, his writings depict somebody who may inexorably be trudging down the stages of mental atrophy.
Just undertake a cursory reading of the previous 4 write-ups of this five part fecal humdrum, and let me know if you would engage him to teach even nursery kids, let alone a university class.
AUTHENTIC C.Y. ANDY-K 7 years ago
That Francis Kwarteng is a villige-boy, who has happen to be in the US of A, stay in one appartment with her sister in Maryland-USA...and not a Professor as some ignorant People may think.
That Francis Kwarteng is a villige-boy, who has happen to be in the US of A, stay in one appartment with her sister in Maryland-USA...and not a Professor as some ignorant People may think.
Village Lass 7 years ago
Interesting, I suspect like a few other readers,fail to follow your narrative in a coherent manner.
Your view on aid for example is too simple because aid itself is a far more complex issue than you put it.
Your article sma ... read full comment
Interesting, I suspect like a few other readers,fail to follow your narrative in a coherent manner.
Your view on aid for example is too simple because aid itself is a far more complex issue than you put it.
Your article smacks of a cut and paste.
come again please....
Prof Lungu 7 years ago
To say....
That said, we want to be careful not to totally accept Mo Ibrahim and his "prize" as perhaps the best promise for leadership and development Africans can have.
To say....
That said, we want to be careful not to totally accept Mo Ibrahim and his "prize" as perhaps the best promise for leadership and development Africans can have.
C.Y. ANDY-K 7 years ago
Mo Ibrahim a ward is an a ward that will never ever happen to any generation of the NDC Party...and that is as sure as a mouse in the Church.
Mo Ibrahim a ward is an a ward that will never ever happen to any generation of the NDC Party...and that is as sure as a mouse in the Church.
Prof Lungu 7 years ago
By the way....for those who have missed it..........!
When history (African history) matters!
Steve Biko is the face of the GOOGLE, on this, his 70th birthday anniversary.
See today, only at: www.google.com/
By the way....for those who have missed it..........!
When history (African history) matters!
Steve Biko is the face of the GOOGLE, on this, his 70th birthday anniversary.
See today, only at: www.google.com/
francis kwarteng 7 years ago
Dear Prof Lungu,
Thanks again for your insightful insights.
Well, I am surprised the Mo Ibrahim Foundation did not offer any assistance to you as far as you say is concerned.
But I do know for a fact that Dr Mohamm ... read full comment
Dear Prof Lungu,
Thanks again for your insightful insights.
Well, I am surprised the Mo Ibrahim Foundation did not offer any assistance to you as far as you say is concerned.
But I do know for a fact that Dr Mohammed Ibrahim, founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, has always taken a keen interest in the shady deals African governments make with foreign interests.
He has personally poignantly and forcefully spoken against most of these bad deals ever since he shot into the lamplight.
As a matter of fact I have published a couple of articles on these types of questions here on Ghanaweb.
He has moved from one African country to another looking into these deals and condemning them in no uncertain terms. The Foundation itself has been doing similarly, so I am still surprised he and the Foundation ignored you.
"Listen to or get a transcript of his speech "Taking Responsibility—How to Fix the Mess That Africa Is In" which he made in Ghana (for more information).
Well check out this (this is just one of many I have read):
Article Title: "A Reporter at Large July 8, 2013 Issue Buried Secrets How an Israeli billionaire wrested control of one of Africa’s biggest prizes."
Author: "Patrick Radden Keefe"
One of the world’s largest known deposits of untapped iron ore is buried inside a great, forested mountain range in the tiny West African republic of Guinea. In the country’s southeast highlands, far from any city or major roads, the Simandou Mountains stretch for seventy miles, looming over the jungle floor like a giant dinosaur spine. Some of the peaks have nicknames that were bestowed by geologists and miners who have worked in the area; one is Iron Maiden, another Metallica. Iron ore is the raw material that, once smelted, becomes steel, and the ore at Simandou is unusually rich, meaning that it can be fed into blast furnaces with minimal processing. During the past decade, as glittering mega-cities rose across China, the global price of iron soared, and investors began seeking new sources of ore. The red earth that dusts the lush vegetation around Simandou and marbles the mountain rock is worth a fortune.
Mining iron ore is complicated and requires a huge amount of capital. Simandou lies four hundred miles from the coast, in jungle so impassable that the first drill rigs had to be transported to the mountaintops with helicopters. The site has barely been developed—no ore has been excavated. Shipping it to China and other markets will require not only the construction of a mine but the building of a railroad line sturdy enough to support freight cars laden with ore. It will also be necessary to have access to a deepwater port, which Guinea lacks.
Guinea is one of the poorest countries on the planet. There is little industry and scarce electricity, and there are few navigable roads. Public institutions hardly function. More than half the population can’t read. “The level of development is equivalent to Liberia or Sierra Leone,” a government adviser in Conakry, Guinea’s ramshackle seaside capital, told me recently. “But in Guinea we haven’t had a civil war.” This dire state of affairs was not inevitable, for the country has a bounty of natural resources. In addition to the iron ore in the Simandou range, Guinea has one of the world’s largest reserves of bauxite—the ore that, twice refined, makes aluminum—and significant quantities of diamonds, gold, uranium, and, off the coast, oil.
As wealthy countries confront the prospect of rapidly depleting natural resources, they are turning, increasingly, to Africa, where oil and minerals worth trillions of dollars remain trapped in the ground. By one estimate, the continent holds thirty per cent of the world’s mineral reserves. Paul Collier, who runs the Center for the Study of African Economies, at Oxford, has suggested that “a new scramble for Africa” is under way. Bilateral trade between China and Africa, which in 2000 stood at ten billion dollars, is projected to top two hundred billion dollars this year. The U.S. now imports more oil from Africa than from the Persian Gulf.
The Western world has always thought of Africa as a continent to take things from, whether it was diamonds, rubber, or slaves. This outlook was inscribed into the very names of Guinea’s neighbor Côte d’Ivoire and of Ghana, which was known to its British masters as the Gold Coast. During the Victorian period, the exploitation of resources was especially brutal; King Leopold II, of Belgium, was so rapacious in his pursuit of rubber that ten million people in the Congo Free State died as a result. The new international stampede for African resources could become another grim story, or it could present an unprecedented opportunity for economic development. Collier, who several years ago wrote a best-seller about global poverty, “The Bottom Billion,” believes that, for countries like Guinea, the extraction of natural resources, rather than foreign aid, offers the greatest chance of economic progress. Simandou alone could potentially generate a hundred and forty billion dollars in revenue over the next quarter century, more than doubling Guinea’s gross domestic product. “The money involved will dwarf everything else,” Collier told me. Like the silver mine in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Nostromo,” the Simandou deposit holds the promise of supplying what Guinea needs most: “law, good faith, order, security.”
As with deepwater oil drilling or with missions to the moon, the export of iron ore requires so much investment and expertise that the business is limited to a few major players. In 1997, the exclusive rights to explore and develop Simandou were given to the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, which is one of the world’s biggest iron-ore producers. In early 2008, Tom Albanese, the company’s chief executive, boasted to shareholders that Simandou was, “without doubt, the top undeveloped tier-one iron-ore asset in the world.” But shortly afterward the government of Guinea declared that Rio Tinto was developing the mine too slowly, citing progress benchmarks that had been missed, and implying that the company was simply hoarding the Simandou deposit—keeping it from competitors while focussing on mines elsewhere.
In July, 2008, Rio Tinto was stripped of its license. Guinean officials then granted exploration permits for half of the deposit to a much smaller company: Beny Steinmetz Group Resources, or B.S.G.R. Beny Steinmetz is, by some estimates, the richest man in Israel; according to Bloomberg, his personal fortune amounts to some nine billion dollars. Steinmetz, who made his name in the diamond trade, hardly ever speaks to the press, and the corporate structures of his various enterprises are so convoluted that it is difficult to assess the extent of his holdings. The Simandou contract was a surprising addition to Steinmetz’s portfolio, because B.S.G.R. had no experience exporting iron ore. A mining executive in Guinea told me, “Diamonds you can carry away from the mine in your pocket. With iron ore, you need infrastructure that can last decades.”
Rio Tinto angrily protested the decision. “We are surprised that a company that has never built an iron-ore-mining operation would have been awarded an area of our concession,” a spokesman said at the time. Company officials complained to the U.S. Embassy in Conakry; one of them suggested that Steinmetz had no intention of developing the mine himself, and planned instead to flip it—“to obtain the concession and then sell it for a big profit.” Rio Tinto viewed Steinmetz, who was rumored to have extensive contacts in Israeli intelligence, as a suspicious interloper. According to a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, the general manager of Rio Tinto told the U.S. Embassy that he did not feel comfortable discussing the Simandou matter on an “unsecured” cell phone. Alan Davies, a senior executive at Rio Tinto, told me that the company had invested hundreds of millions of dollars at the site, and had been moving as expeditiously as possible on a project that would have required decades to complete. “This was quite a shocking event for the company,” he said.
In April, 2009, the Ministry of Mines in Conakry ratified the agreement with Steinmetz. A year later, he made a deal with the Brazilian mining company Vale—one of Rio Tinto’s chief competitors. Vale agreed to pay two and a half billion dollars in exchange for a fifty-one-per-cent stake in B.S.G.R.’s Simandou operations. This was an extraordinary windfall: B.S.G.R. had paid nothing up front, as is customary with exploration licenses, and at that point had invested only a hundred and sixty million dollars. In less than five years, B.S.G.R.’s investment in Simandou had become a five-billion-dollar asset. At that time, the annual budget of the government of Guinea amounted to just $1.2 billion. Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese telecom billionaire, captured the reaction of many observers when he asked, at a forum in Dakar, “Are the Guineans who did that deal idiots, or criminals, or both?”
Steinmetz was proud of the transaction. “People don’t like success,” he told the Financial Times, in a rare interview, in 2012. “It’s disturbing to people that the small David can disturb the big Goliath.” He said that it was B.S.G.R.’s strategy to pursue “opportunities in an aggressive way,” adding, “You have to get your hands dirty.”
In Conakry, there were rumors that Steinmetz had acquired the concession through bribes. According to Transparency International, Guinea is one of the most corrupt countries on earth. A Human Rights Watch report suggested that, when Steinmetz acquired his parcel of Simandou, Guinea was effectively a kleptocracy, with its leaders presiding over “an increasing criminalization of the state.” A recent report by the Africa Progress Panel, which is chaired by Kofi Annan, suggests that well-connected foreigners often purchase lucrative assets in Africa at prices far below market value, by offering inducements to predatory local élites. “Africa’s resource wealth has bypassed the vast majority of African people and built vast fortunes for a privileged few,” it says. The report highlights the billions of dollars that Vale agreed to pay Steinmetz for Simandou, noting that “the people of Guinea, who appear to have lost out as a result of the undervaluation of the concession, will not share in that gain.”
In 2010, several months after the Vale deal was announced, Guinea held its first fully democratic elections since independence, ending half a century of authoritarian rule. The new President, Alpha Condé, had run on a platform of good governance and greater transparency in the mining sector. But as he took office he faced the possibility that Guinea’s most prized mineral asset may have been traded out from under the country. He could not simply void the contract. “There is continuity of the state,” he told me recently. “I couldn’t put things back where they had been—unless I had right on my side.” B.S.G.R. denied any wrongdoing: “These allegations are false, and are a smear campaign against B.S.G.R.,” a company spokesman told me. If the Simandou license had been secured through bribery, then the deal could potentially be undone. But Condé and his advisers would have to prove it.
“I inherited a country but not a state,” Condé told me when I first met him, in January. He had come to the Swiss Alps to attend the World Economic Forum, in Davos, and we met in a hotel suite that was bathed in sunlight reflecting off the snowbanks outside. Condé is a tall man with a high forehead, and he has small eyes that light up with wry amusement when he listens. He wore a brown suit and a red tie. Lowering himself into a wingback chair, he listed slightly to the right while we talked, in a posture of heavy-lies-the-crown fatigue. At times, his elbow appeared to be propping up his whole body, like a tent pole.
When he was elected President, Condé was seventy-two years old, and he had spent much of his life in exile. He left Guinea as a boy, when it was still ruled by France, and eventually settled in Paris, where he became a leader of the pan-African student movements of the nineteen-sixties. He studied law, lectured at the University of Paris, and emerged as perhaps the most famous member of the Guinean opposition. For this distinction, he was sentenced to death, in absentia, by the first despot to rule an independent Guinea, and jailed for more than two years by the second, after he returned, in 1991, to run, unsuccessfully, for President. The 2010 election was bitter—his challenger, Cellou Dalein Diallo, had been a government minister when Condé was thrown in jail. After Condé was finally inaugurated as President, he pledged to be the Nelson Mandela of Guinea.
First, he told me, he had to confront the legacy of a decades-long “state of anarchy.” The government in Conakry had a Potemkin quality: a profusion of bureaucrats showed up for work at crumbling administrative buildings, but there was little genuine institutional capacity. “The central bank, they were printing counterfeit money,” Condé said. Yet he couldn’t fire every official; he’d have to make do with a civil service that had never known anything but graft. “Almost everybody who had any expertise was compromised,” one person who has advised Condé told me. “So he had to balance between people who were competent but compromised and people who were upstanding but inexperienced.”
Condé was defensive about the fact that he had spent so much of his life abroad; when I raised the subject, he snapped, “I know Guinea better than those who have never left.” But his outsider status meant that he was not implicated in the scandals of past administrations. And, having spent much of his life in France, he was strikingly at ease in places like Davos. The U.S. Ambassador in Conakry, Alex Laskaris, told me, “Condé has a much broader circle of contacts and advisers globally than any other African head of state I’ve dealt with.” Bernard Kouchner, the former foreign minister of France, went to high school with Condé, and is a good friend. Kouchner introduced him to George Soros, the billionaire financier, who became an informal adviser, and connected him with Paul Collier, the Oxford economist. Collier, in turn, introduced Condé to Tony Blair, who offered him assistance through an organization that he runs, the Africa Governance Initiative.
These Westerners saw in Condé an opportunity to save Guinea. Collier told me that what the country needed above all was “integrity at the top.” Condé could be ornery; he had a tendency to lecture his interlocutors as though they were students. And, after a life spent in perpetual opposition, it was not clear how well he would govern. From the start, he had difficulties. He came into office with a commitment to complete Guinea’s democratic transition by holding parliamentary elections, but he delayed them, ostensibly on procedural grounds, then delayed them again. Opposition riots broke out in Conakry, leading to a series of violent confrontations between demonstrators and government security forces.
For all the tumult, Condé’s foreign friends and advisers maintain faith in his ethics. “He is absolutely incorruptible,” Kouchner told me. “He’s not luxurious. He’s not travelling. He is having a cold potato at night!” Corinne Dufka, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, has not lost hope that Condé can succeed as a reformer. “There’s a lot of work to be done for Guinea to overcome its legacy of abusive rule,” she said. “Power remains too heavily concentrated in the executive, and, without a robust judiciary or a democratically elected parliament, there is next to no oversight, which they desperately need. But Condé has made real progress in confronting the disastrous governance and rights problems he inherited.”
It is no easy task to transform a country that is corrupt from top to bottom. During Condé’s first months in office, he performed a kind of triage. With the assistance of Revenue Watch—an organization, backed by Soros, that encourages transparency in extractive industries—Condé established a committee to inspect existing mining contracts and determine if any of them were problematic. He didn’t know Steinmetz—“I didn’t know any miners,” he said, with pride—but there were elements of the Simandou deal that appeared to warrant an investigation. “I found it a bit strange that they had invested a hundred and sixty million dollars and were going to earn billions,” Condé said. “It’s a little . . .” He smiled and gave a Gallic shrug.
Beny Steinmetz, who is fifty-six, does not seem to live anywhere in particular. He shuttles, on his private jet, between Tel Aviv (where his family lives, in one of the most expensive houses in Israel), Geneva (where he technically resides, for tax purposes), London (where the main management office of B.S.G.R. is situated), and far-flung locations connected to his diamond and mineral interests, from Macedonia to Sierra Leone. He is technically not an executive of the conglomerate that bears his name, but merely the chief beneficiary of a foundation into which the profits flow. This is a legal fig leaf. Ehud Olmert, the former Prime Minister of Israel and a friend of his, described Steinmetz as “a one-man show.” Olmert continued, “I don’t quite understand the legal aspects—just know that he can work ceaselessly and will move from one side of the globe to the other if he identifies a promising deal.” Steinmetz is very fit and exercises every day, no matter where he is. With blue eyes, tousled sandy hair, a preference for casual dress, and a deep tan, he looks more like a movie agent than like a magnate.
“I grew up in a home where diamonds were the subject,” Steinmetz has said. His father, Rubin, was a Polish diamond cutter who learned the business in Antwerp before settling in Palestine, in 1936. A family photograph from 1977 captures Beny as a young man, sitting at a cluttered table with his two older brothers and his father, who looks sternly at the camera while Beny inspects a precious stone. That year, Beny finished his military service and struck out for Antwerp, with instructions to expand the company’s international business in polished stones. According to a privately published history of the family business, “The Steinmetz Diamond Story,” Beny branched into Africa, in search of new sources of rough stones. The plan wasn’t to establish mines but, rather, to make deals with the people doing the digging.
Approximately half the diamonds in the world originate in sub-Saharan Africa, and many ambitious Westerners have followed the lead of Cecil Rhodes—the founder of De Beers—and sought fortunes on the continent. “Unfortunately, there aren’t any diamond mines in Piccadilly,” Dag Cramer, who oversees Steinmetz’s business interests, told me. “That’s not where God put the assets.”
Instead, diamonds tend to be found in countries that are plagued by underdevelopment and corruption and, often, by war. This is enough to scare off many investors, but not all; some entrepreneurs are drawn to the heady combination of political uncertainty, physical danger, and potentially astronomical rewards. Ambassador Laskaris, who has done tours in Liberia and Angola, likened the diamond trade in much of Africa to the seedy cantina in “Star Wars.” “It attracts all the rejects of the galaxy,” he said. “Low barriers to entry. It rewards corruption. It also rewards a little bit of brutality.”
Steinmetz plunged into Africa’s treacherous political waters. In the nineteen-nineties, he was the largest purchaser of diamonds from Angola; later, he became the biggest private investor in Sierra Leone. Today, Steinmetz is the largest buyer of rough diamonds from De Beers, and one of the major suppliers of Tiffany & Company. And he has diversified his holdings into real estate, minerals, oil and gas, and other fields, with interests in more than twenty countries. A Web site that Steinmetz recently set up describes him as a “visionary” who used a “network of contacts on the African continent” to build “a multi-faced empire.”
Paul Collier, however, takes a dim view of businessmen like Steinmetz, who have secured the rights to natural resources that they may not actually have the expertise to develop. “Their technical competence is a social-network map,” Collier said. “ ‘Who has the power to make the decision? Who can I reach?’ They know how to get a contract—that is their skill.” (Cramer rejected this characterization, insisting that Steinmetz makes sustainable investments wherever he operates. “B.S.G.R. is not a company that has ever been in the business of obtaining rights and flipping them,” he told me.)
Despite his great wealth, Steinmetz has maintained an exceptionally low profile. Last year, after “Hamakor,” a news program on Israeli television, devoted an episode to a battle that he was having with tax authorities in Tel Aviv, he threatened legal action and succeeded in blocking the program from being posted on the Internet. “He’s a very private guy,” Alon Pinkas, a friend of Steinmetz’s who once served as Israel’s consul-general in New York, told me. “His family is all he cares about—and his business.”
Steinmetz’s diamond business, however, has occasionally engaged in some creative publicity. The company sponsors Formula 1 events, sometimes furnishing drivers with diamond-encrusted helmets and steering wheels. At a 2004 race in Monaco, a large Steinmetz diamond was affixed to the nose of a Jaguar race car. As the vehicle tore around a hairpin curve, the driver lost control and the Jaguar slammed into a guardrail. The diamond, which was reportedly a hundred and eight carats and worth two hundred thousand dollars, was never recovered.
General Lansana Conté, the dictator who ruled Guinea before Alpha Condé became President, was famously corrupt: he referred to his ministers, not without affection, as “thieves,” and once remarked, “If we had to shoot every Guinean who had stolen from Guinea there would be no one left to kill.” By 2008, after more than two decades in power, he had become ill, and had largely stopped appearing in public; when he did, he was propped up by bodyguards and orbited by adjutants who often made a show of stooping to whisper in his ear, even when it was obvious, to a close observer, that he was asleep.
During this period, Steinmetz flew to Conakry and met with Conté. At the General’s compound, they sat and talked beneath a mango tree. Conté was aware of B.S.G.R. because it had acquired the rights to explore two small parcels of land abutting the Simandou range—places where others in the mining industry had not thought to look. In 2006, one of Steinmetz’s employees called him from the top of a mountain, using a satellite phone, and said, “Beny, you cannot believe. I’m standing on so much iron here, you have no idea.” After this success, General Conté began to entertain the idea of reapportioning the Simandou deposit. It was not long after he met Steinmetz that he stripped Rio Tinto of its claim and gave B.S.G.R. a license to explore half the Simandou range. Two weeks after General Conté signed the deal, he died.
Hours later, a military coup installed an erratic young Army captain, Moussa Dadis Camara. The junta was a nightmarish period for Guinea. In September, 2009, during an opposition rally at a stadium in Conakry, government soldiers massacred more than a hundred and fifty demonstrators. The U.S. evacuated most of its staff from the Embassy, and the International Criminal Court described the violence as a crime against humanity. But B.S.G.R. stayed put. On one occasion, Steinmetz flew in with two of his sons to meet Captain Dadis. They invited him to Israel to attend the wedding of Steinmetz’s daughter—a celebration with more than a thousand guests. (Dadis sent his regrets.)
To Steinmetz, this cultivation of the junta only proved his company’s unshakable commitment to Guinea. “We put money in the ground at a time when people thought we were crazy,” he told the Financial Times. B.S.G.R. and the junta eventually came to terms over how the company would export iron ore. It did not have to build a deepwater port or a railroad capable of carrying iron ore to Guinea’s coast. Instead, B.S.G.R. could pursue a cheaper option: exporting the ore through Liberia, which already had the necessary infrastructure. For years, the government of Guinea had resisted such a scenario when Rio Tinto had proposed it. As a concession, B.S.G.R. agreed to spend a billion dollars developing a passenger railway for Guinea.
In December, 2009, an aide shot Captain Dadis in the head. He survived, and fled the country; another interim government took over. Once again, Steinmetz weathered the chaos, and in April, 2010, he flew to Rio de Janeiro to finalize the two-and-a-half-billion-dollar deal with Vale. Afterward, he stopped at a shipyard in Chile, to check on the progress of a mega-yacht that he had commissioned to be built there.
Alpha Condé, Guinea’s President, launched an inquiry into whether a parcel of Simandou had been obtained with bribes.
Dr. J. K. Bokor 7 years ago
Stop running your mouth, and write proper English...since when can you PUBLISH an article on Ghanaweb. Is it not that, you Post your clap to be published by the Editor of Ghanaweb, Francis Akoto? And it's very sad that your u ... read full comment
Stop running your mouth, and write proper English...since when can you PUBLISH an article on Ghanaweb. Is it not that, you Post your clap to be published by the Editor of Ghanaweb, Francis Akoto? And it's very sad that your useless copy work is published to the public.
Kpengson Ray 7 years ago
Bokor, can you tell what went wrong for John Mahama's govt? You have been too silent on this!
Bokor, can you tell what went wrong for John Mahama's govt? You have been too silent on this!
francis kwarteng 7 years ago
Here is another one (There are more that Ibrahim has done and is still doing on the very things you said the Foundation did not do in your case. We shall save this for later.
Fortunately, though, the Foundation (and membe ... read full comment
Here is another one (There are more that Ibrahim has done and is still doing on the very things you said the Foundation did not do in your case. We shall save this for later.
Fortunately, though, the Foundation (and members of its Board of Directors) has been doing what Ibrahim has been doing when it comes to bad deals African governments make with foreign interests):
Annals of Communications March 7, 2011 Issue
Title: "The Dictator Index
A billionaire battles a continent’s legacy of misrule."
Author: Ken Auletta
One day last March, students crammed into the Great Hall at the University of Ghana, outside Accra. They filled the plastic chairs set up to face an ornate wooden lectern, and lined the hallways around the auditorium. It was oppressively hot, and a fan was positioned to blow air toward the speaker, Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born billionaire who built one of the first mobile-phone networks on the continent. He stood alone onstage, flanked by four golden floor-to-ceiling columns. His speech was titled “Taking Responsibility—How to Fix the Mess That Africa Is In.”
Ibrahim, who is squat and round, with a flat nose, bulging eyes, and a shiny bronzed head, startled the audience by asking, “Guys, why are we dressed in suits and ties?” He peeled off his jacket and dropped it on the floor. Then he yanked off his tie, and the students cheered. In accented and colloquial English, he went on to criticize both African and Western conventional wisdom.
“We are a very rich continent, the second-largest continent in the world, lush-green, plenty of resources. Everything we have. Yet we are the poorest people on earth. So, rich continent, poor people. After fifty years of independence, I don’t think we can continue to blame the colonialists.” In this speech, as in others, he took care to extoll Africa and its people, noting that, at the time colonialism ended, “this country Ghana, my country Sudan, Egypt, many countries had higher G.D.P.s and income per head than China, than India, than South Korea, than Malaysia, than Singapore.” The problems since are due to “a catastrophic failure of leadership and governance. There is no other explanation. We have had to a very large extent very lousy leadership in Africa: too many dictators, too many megalomaniacs, too many thieves, who bled this continent for their personal and family interest.” He continued, “All those leaders love Western culture when it comes to expensive French wine, expensive American cars, mobile phones, air-conditioning, aircraft, whatever. They love Western culture. When you speak about human rights, they say, ‘No, no, no, no. Those are Western values.’ “
He spoke for an hour, and then bantered with the audience for an hour and a half. Questioners called him Mo, as everyone does. When he finished, his shirt was soaked with perspiration. The crowd applauded thunderously. Ibrahim is self-confident to the point of arrogance. “It was fantastic,” he recalls, of the response. “The kids never disputed what I was saying: ‘Stop making excuses.’ “
Ibrahim, who is sixty-four years old, is often hailed as a hero in Africa. His mobile-phone company, Celtel, contributed to the development of civil society across the continent, and he’s now spending the money he earned to try to change the values of the dictators, megalomaniacs, and thieves. Each year, he sponsors the Ibrahim Prize, which bestows five million dollars on an African leader who is elected to office, promotes democracy, does not steal from the people, and cedes power peacefully. Essentially, Ibrahim pays leaders to stay honest. He has also created the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, a numerical evaluation of Africa’s fifty-three governments. If a leader becomes more oppressive and corrupt, or doesn’t invest in education and welcome private investment, his country’s ranking falls. Ibrahim then buys advertisements in all the local newspapers to announce this.
With citizen revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Djibouti, Morocco, and elsewhere, Africa is undergoing perhaps its greatest political convulsion since the end of colonialism, and few private citizens have done as much, or spent as much, in recent years to push for the kind of democracy that people are demanding in the streets. The outpouring for Ibrahim in Ghana, in fact, was an early expression of the desire for political reform that has swept the north of the continent. For decades, well-meaning people have been saying that Africa would be O.K. if it could just get more aid. Ibrahim’s message is different: Africa needs to take responsibility for itself, and it needs to start by jettisoning its awful leaders. “I’m so delighted to see people still have not lost their guts to go out and make a point,” Ibrahim told me in early February. “In this region, that never happened before.”
Ibrahim was in Ghana in part for meetings arranged by ONE, an anti-poverty organization on whose board Ibrahim sits. The group was co-founded in 2008 by Bono, the lead singer of U2, who accompanied Ibrahim. The trip, Bono noted, was one of the rare occurrences when he often passed unrecognized and a member of his entourage was mobbed like a rock star. “People were elbowing me out of the way to get to
Mo,” Bono said, laughing. He added that he was dazzled by Ibrahim’s speech. “He refused to talk either up or down to people,” Bono said, comparing Ibrahim to a skilled comedian who “commands attention by saying things in the room no one else will say.”
When Ibrahim left the stage in Ghana, he was surrounded by so many students that he had to be extracted from the crowd and taken to his plane. At the airport, taxi-drivers and baggage handlers shouted, “Mo!” and massed around him. They all wanted to do something that wasn’t possible ten years ago but that is now, in large part because of Ibrahim’s work: snap a picture with their cell phones.
Mohamed Ibrahim was born on May 3, 1946, in Northern Sudan, which was then jointly administered by Egypt and Britain. His family was ethnically Nubian, and they lived in Alexandria, at the edge of the Nile River Delta. Ibrahim’s parents were Muslim, and he was the second of five children, four of them boys. Ibrahim’s father, Fathi, who had only an elementary-school education, worked for a cotton company. His mother, Aida, Ibrahim said, was a homemaker who “believed very strongly in education as a means for improvement. She was relentless in pushing us.” He and his four siblings attended strict Nubian elementary and preparatory schools. He was always near the top of his class, and his heroes were Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. Alexandria University offered him a scholarship, and he studied electrical engineering. All the children graduated from college. Two of his siblings became doctors, one an accountant, and the other a marketing executive.
At Alexandria University, Ibrahim spent his free time reading Marx, Engels, and Hemingway. He identified with leftist leaders who were aligned neither with the United States nor with the Soviet Union: Gamal Abdel Nasser, of Egypt; Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; Kwame Nkrumah, of Ghana. All were charismatic orators without any background in governing.
When Ibrahim graduated, in 1968, he moved to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to work for the national telephone company, Sudan Telecom. He travelled frequently for the firm, mostly to England, and grew increasingly irritated by the company’s inefficiency and aversion to risk-taking. Working for the state convinced him that state-led socialism was impractical. In 1973, he married Hania Fadl, whom he had known since childhood. She had graduated from Alexandria University a year after he did and went on to become a doctor with Sudan’s Ministry of Health. The following year, Ibrahim received a graduate scholarship to study mobile communications at the University of Bradford, in England. Hania, who kept her maiden name, received a scholarship to attend St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in London. Over the next thirty years, she became a leading breast-cancer specialist with the National Health Service. They have a son, Hosh, thirty-five, and a daughter, Hadeel, twenty-seven.
Ibrahim got his master’s and then moved to the University of Birmingham, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1981. He had no teaching duties, so he spent countless hours in the laboratory, studying what happens when a signal is exchanged between a transmitter and a receiver that are not positioned in a straight line. In the eighties, he and his team of engineers did pioneering work in the prediction of whether radio-wave signals were strong enough to pierce buildings or go around hills.
In 1983, British Telecom hired him as a technical director, and he was promoted rapidly in BT’s mobile division. Ibrahim’s group designed the first handheld mobile-phone network in the world, but he could not get the attention of senior executives. The company was deeply bureaucratic and worried that mobile sales would undermine a profitable landline business. By late 1989, he had decided that he would never again work for a big company.
Calling himself “a reluctant entrepreneur,” Ibrahim founded a consultancy, Mobile Systems International, that year. Its first office was in the dining room of his London home. Several years later, he recruited a C.E.O. to run the company while he focussed on strategy. In ten years, M.S.I. grew to eight hundred employees and provided advice to companies that developed major mobile-communication networks in North America, Europe, and Japan. During this time, Ibrahim designed and trademarked software, known as Planet, that made transmissions more efficient. It was adopted by Motorola, Siemens, and others. During its first decade, M.S.I. did business in South Africa but nowhere else on the continent. By the late nineteen-nineties, though, Ibrahim was starting to think about beginning something new, and he saw an opportunity for profit. He decided to start a company, called Celtel, that would bring mobile phones to the rest of Africa. He knew that the continent had almost no cellular service, and because there was terrible landline service he would have little competition. Many African countries also offered free licenses to mobile companies willing to invest.
Ibrahim faced enormous obstacles. The roads and rail links were primitive, corruption was common, and electricity was scarce. Many Africans were desperately poor and isolated in rural areas; they appeared to have scant means to climb from poverty.
The banks did not want to invest. The risks, they told Ibrahim, were too steep. There were too many civil wars and too much rapacity. “I think they were very ignorant of what was happening in Africa,” Ibrahim recalls of these early conversations. “Some of their information dated back to old movies. ‘Tarzan,’ maybe. One banker asked, ‘How can you ask us to invest in a country run by Idi Amin?’ I said, ‘He left Uganda fifteen years ago!’ “
Ibrahim had to seek capital elsewhere. Some funding came from the CDC Group, the investment arm of Britain’s aid agency, and the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector branch of the World Bank. One early investor was Thomas C. Barry, of Zephyr Management, in New York, who says he thought that Ibrahim was “unusual” because he combined an engineering degree with a business résumé: “While Celtel was like a startup, this was a guy who had operated in a Western-style business. He inspired a lot of confidence.” Barry joined his board.
In 2000, Ibrahim sold M.S.I. for six hundred and eighteen million dollars to Marconi, a British electronics company, and focussed on Celtel. He targeted a group of countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Uganda, Malawi, Congo, Gabon, Sierra Leone, and several others. Ibrahim knew that the people his company would cater to didn’t have access to banking services. But if he could sell prepaid credit or scratch cards for two or three dollars, and if the calls were inexpensive, it could develop into a business. Scratch cards had been used in Europe, but Ibrahim popularized them in Africa.
The demand for mobile service exceeded expectations; when the company entered Gabon, in 1999, customers knocked the doors off their hinges trying to get in. Ibrahim again recruited an experienced C.E.O. By 2004, more than ninety per cent of Celtel’s four thousand employees were African; the company provided service to six million customers in thirteen countries. The next year, its revenues reached a billion dollars.
As Celtel expanded, Ibrahim became more convinced that African governments hindered development. One dramatic example came as he tried to do business in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo-Brazzaville, two poor countries divided by the Congo River. All calls between the two states had to be routed through Europe because the two governments mistrusted each other. A one-minute call cost a dollar. It took Celtel a year of negotiations to persuade the two nations to establish a microwave link. When they did, the cost of a one-minute call dropped to twenty-eight cents.
Ibrahim also had to deal with extensive government corruption. When confronted by requests for bribes, Ibrahim instructed employees to say, “How much do you want? Two million? Three million?” Employees were told to ask people to submit the request for a payoff in writing, which of course no one would do. To further insure that no one in the company would pay a large bribe, he stipulated that no Celtel employee could spend more than thirty thousand dollars without the approval of the entire board. Celtel was never accused of corruption.
The number of mobile phones in Africa has grown from fewer than four million in 1998 to more than four hundred million today—almost half the population of the continent. The phones have created jobs—presently, the company that Ibrahim started has more than five hundred thousand scratch-card outlets—and infrastructure. Migrant workers who leave home for distant jobs can stay in touch with their families. Businesses can talk to customers and suppliers, and employees in different offices can speak with each other. Farmers now compare prices before selling their produce. The nearest doctors can be located. Mobile banking has been introduced. During elections, people have taken pictures documenting vote fraud or intimidation with their mobile phones and sent text messages about possible improprieties. “That’s all happening because the platform exists in the form of mobile phones, which Mo, probably more than anyone in sub-Saharan Africa, has helped put in place,” Rajiv Shah, the administrator of U.S.A.I.D., says.
In 2004, Ibrahim announced that he planned to take Celtel public, but six firms bid to own the company outright. Ibrahim told me that he didn’t want to sell. He wanted it to be “the first African company to have a primary listing on London’s stock exchange.” His investors, however, could not resist the allure of a three-billion-four-hundred-million-dollar offer, made by MTC Kuwait, in 2005. A hundred of Celtel’s employees became millionaires. Ibrahim took his money—Forbes estimates his personal fortune to be more than two billion dollars—and left Celtel to do something new. He started the Mo Ibrahim Foundation the following year.
“Throughout my life, I always believed in civil society,” Ibrahim said to me one November afternoon in his three-bedroom penthouse at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France. He had played golf that morning, and he was wearing a long-sleeved blue club shirt, jeans, and white sneakers. It was raining, so he could not venture out on his terrace, overlooking the beach and the Bay of Cannes, to smoke his pipe. A chilled, unopened bottle of Domaine Ott rosé, sent up by the hotel management, was on the coffee table. He had read his three daily newspapers, Al-Hayat, the International Herald Tribune, and the Financial Times, and had tossed them on the yellow Persian carpet. His cell phones rang regularly. An open laptop on the dining-room table was surrounded by piles of invitations: to meet with African business and government leaders; to attend a U.N. conference on drugs, crime, and human trafficking; to go to a “green revolution” confab in Geneva hosted by the Gates and the Rockefeller Foundations.
Ibrahim owns a one-bedroom apartment in Monte Carlo and is a resident of Monaco, where he lives nine months of the year. (Switzerland offered the same tax benefits, but not the golf, mild weather, and proximity to Africa.) In addition to his apartment in Monaco, which was being renovated, he also owns an apartment in Cairo and a town house in London, which he occupies no more than fifty nights each year, in order to protect his foundation’s tax status. He owns another home in Khartoum, where his wife spends ninety per cent of her time. With the help of the foundation, she constructed a large hospital there and established a breast-cancer treatment center, which their son, Hosh, runs. Ibrahim, however, is an open critic of the Sudanese government and is not popular with the authorities there. He has not visited the country in more than seven years. He sees his wife infrequently, but they talk on the phone every day.
After asking whether I minded if he smoked, he pulled out a black leather pouch, filled a pipe with tobacco, and lit up. “Governance is about managing this place,” he said. “It’s a mess. There is a need to enshrine the rule of law. That is the first step toward building an advanced society.” He sat up on the couch, and began speaking so fast in his accented English that words seemed to collide. “Transparency. Lack of corruption. Human rights of individuals. Building infrastructure. Taking care of education. Health. All these things are pillars of a civil society.” What prevents these, he says, is “lack of good governance.”
One impediment to governance, he explained, was that liberation movements captured many African governments. They took control, created one-party states, and followed a philosophy of “I liberated you. You owe me!” Ibrahim continued, “Then came the Cold War, which was at its highest during the fight for independence. It didn’t matter if you were a dictator or a thief. If you were an ally, then you were a client state.” As a result, the West helped corrupt or repressive tyrants like Mobutu Sese Seko, in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Daniel arap Moi, in Kenya, stay in power for decades. With assistance from the West, Hosni Mubarak solidified control when he took over Egypt’s government, in 1981.
As early as 2001, at Celtel, Ibrahim began talking about the dangers of weak governments. Salim Ahmed Salim, the former head of the Organization of African Unity, and a member of Ibrahim’s corporate board, recalls that Ibrahim was angered by the governments they encountered. Ibrahim told Salim he wanted to establish a foundation that would celebrate good leaders. On the day he sold the company, he told another Celtel board member and investor, Tsega Gebreyes, a businesswoman from Ethiopia, “Now I have to start thinking about the foundation. We’re going to give the biggest prize ever. Bigger than the Nobel Prize.” Gebreyes co-founded an investment firm with Ibrahim, Satya Capital, which has more than two hundred million dollars to invest in African companies.
In 2006, Ibrahim unveiled the Ibrahim Prize. The aim of the award is to spur African leaders to excel—or at least to insure that they don’t stay in office because they lack a retirement plan. Recipients, who must be outgoing heads of state, receive an award of five million dollars over ten years, and a lifetime grant of two hundred thousand dollars annually. Another two hundred thousand dollars is given annually if they establish a charitable foundation.
For centuries, incentives have been offered for leaders to relinquish power. French kings would welcome and sometimes provide stipends to ousted British royalty in order to reward allegiance or to support a potential rival government. In the twentieth century, refuge has been granted to many murderous dictators. It is done out of loyalty, or compassion, or religious or ideological solidarity, or to buy peace. The government of Saudi Arabia allowed Idi Amin to flee Uganda and settle there in 1980. In return for a generous subsidy from the royal family, Amin agreed to stay out of politics. This January, Saudi Arabia welcomed the Tunisian President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
Ibrahim is doing something different. “We are not dealing with dictators. We are dealing with good people,” he says. In Africa, “You don’t have the option to write books or go on corporate boards. European leaders can become rich after office. African leaders don’t have that option.” Three years ago, after British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped down, he earned a book advance of eight million dollars (which he donated to charity), and he gets up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per lecture. Bill Clinton received fifteen million dollars to write his memoirs. Ibrahim says he wanted to “create an environment” for outstanding African leaders “to have a second life.”
To gain further attention, Ibrahim recruited a prestigious selection committee, which consisted of three Nobel laureates—Kofi Annan, the former U.N. Secretary-General; Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and one of the icons of the Egyptian opposition; and the former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari—plus two distinguished African activists and two foundation board members, Salim and Mary Robinson, the former Irish President and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. In February, Annan stepped down as chairman, and was replaced by Salim. The prize-committee board has its own research arm, which prepares monthly reports on potential candidates. Ibrahim has put up all the money personally, he says, because he doesn’t want the prize-givers to be accused of being “stooges.” If an American or “an outsider” expressed critical views, the response might be: “ ‘Who are you to tell us?’ If an African goes and says the same thing, it’s different. No one will tell me it’s not my business. We had to be a true African foundation, not a black face for a white foundation. If we were funded by the British government, for example, how could we stand up and criticize the election process in Zimbabwe?”
The prize was first awarded in 2007, to Joaquim Chissano, the former President of Mozambique. After fighting in his country’s war for independence against Portugal, Chissano became foreign minister in 1975 and then President. In office, he negotiated an end to a sixteen-year civil war. In 1994, he oversaw the country’s first free elections. He championed the ratification of a new constitution, adopted a multiparty system of governance, and welcomed fifteen thousand rebels to join the national Army. A former Marxist, he helped Mozambique become a market economy, and declined to seek a third term as President. Although Mozambique is infested with corruption, Chissano enjoys a reputation for personal probity.
Festus Mogae, of Botswana, won the 2008 prize. He chose to leave office after two terms, encouraged opposition political parties, and adopted an aggressive policy to combat AIDS. I met Mogae—a short, stout, bald man with a cheerful I-don’t-take-myself-too-seriously manner—in November at an Ibrahim-sponsored conference in Mauritius. He was wearing a black Meridien Hotel T-shirt with large letters on the back declaring “DISCOVER ME.” The main purpose of the award, he says, is “to encourage leaders to leave.” Otherwise, even democratically elected ones are tempted, at the end of their terms, to change “the constitution to allow them to stay forever.” The award has helped Mogae establish a local foundation that supports Botswanan students as well as two schools for the blind. One negative effect of the prize, he notes, is that people now know that he is relatively rich. “I leave my cell phone off, because when I turn it on I see sixty calls for help,” he says.
The Ibrahim Foundation has not granted a prize for the past two years. The selection committee believed that no outgoing African head of state deserved it, and the foundation board concurred. “We’re not easy graders,” ElBaradei says. Two prominent leaders who recently left office—John Kufuor, of Ghana, and Thabo Mbeki, of South Africa—were widely thought to be candidates. “The people around the President of Ghana were lobbying,” Mary Robinson says. But committee members did not believe that Kufuor was worthy. Mamphela Ramphele, a foundation board member and fellow South African, thinks that Mbeki was vetoed because he refused to deal with his country’s AIDS epidemic and because he blessed the tyrannical rule of Robert Mugabe, in neighboring Zimbabwe.
The prize has been described as a form of bribery. Geraldine Bedell wrote in Britain’s Observer, “The businessman who prides himself on never having paid a bribe now seems to be offering a bribe to political leaders . . . who are only doing what they’re elected to do.” Ibrahim’s eyes widen as he coolly rejects this claim: “Bribery is usually given under the table. I never heard of bribery given above the table. And what do we get back from them? Why do you want to bribe someone who left office?”
Detractors also note that the prize creates perverse incentives. Good leaders have an incentive to step down, but bad leaders don’t. It’s like a corporate-buyout program limited to the best performers. If the current President of the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, had a chance at the prize, might he have peacefully handed over power after losing the election in November—instead of hanging on and inciting a brutal conflict? Perhaps there’s a sum that could persuade Mugabe to spend the rest of his years next to a swimming pool. Ibrahim bridles at the idea. “If somebody would like to do that, they are welcome to go do that. We did not corner the market on prizes or inducements.” He adds that his five-million-dollar prize “is peanuts. What is that to a dictator who’s siphoning billions of dollars? It is totally futile. And I also think it’s immoral.”
Steven Friedman, the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg and Rhodes University, calls the prize élitist. He charges that it overemphasizes the power of leaders and underemphasizes the power of everyone else. Some countries with heads of state who have been rebuffed—such as Ghana—are far more prosperous and democratic than Mozambique. Ibrahim counters that, in Africa, where civil society is still developing slowly, “the actions of the President are really crucial. There are no checks and balances to control their power”—no independent legislatures or courts. “Don’t say this is élitist. This is a fact of life.”
Perhaps the most common critique of the prize is that the failure to grant one for the past two years has reinforced negative stereotypes of Africa. How can you inspire people to emulate leaders when you don’t single out any for praise? This criticism won’t be remedied anytime soon. A member of the prize committee told me, “It is going to be difficult to find credible candidates to give it to for the next couple of years.” The Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, who later this year will publish a book called “Defeating Dictators,” notes that although nine African dictators held Presidential elections in 2010, there was not a single peaceful transfer of power.
One of the most plausible candidates is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, of Liberia, the first female head of state in Africa. She was democratically elected, and if she wins reëlection to a second six-year term, this year, she will not be eligible until 2017. Testifying to the allure of the prize, she wrote in a recent memoir that “perhaps I will earn the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. . . . There’s no reason a woman cannot win soon. I am increasingly looking forward to that chance.”
Ibrahim wanted to base the prize more on science than on his hunches. “I’m a businessman. And I’m an engineer,” he said. “As an engineer, you don’t talk about things. You define them. . . . We wanted to define governance. And we wanted to find out how to measure it.” After reading articles by Robert Rotberg, then the director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Ibrahim asked him to design a system to rigorously measure governance in Africa. In 2006, Rotberg and his colleagues combined fifty-seven variables into a ranking. At the end, each African government had a score between one and a hundred. Somalia came in last, at 28.1; Mauritius did the best, at 86.2.
Rotberg continued to work on the index for three years. But, in 2009, he had a falling out with the Ibrahim Foundation, partly because the board wanted his Harvard team to quickly cede control of the index to African scholars and to the foundation. The economist Hania Farhan, a native of Jordan, now works with the African researchers and oversees the index from the foundation’s office on Portman Square, in London. They have expanded to eighty-eight the number of variables that the index examines, and all the variables are given equal weight. Farhan admits that “this is an art as well as a science,” and that some important data are either not available or “patchy.” No comprehensive measure of poverty, for example, exists. To save the Ibrahim Foundation from having to send thousands of people into the field, they use data already gathered by others, such as quality of budget management, as measured by the World Bank; access to clean water, as measured by the World Health Organization; and political oppression, as measured by Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department.
Critics argue that it doesn’t make sense to give equal priority to every one of the categories. Is “orderly transfer of power” or “freedom of expression” really worth the same as “immunization against measles”? Partha Dasgupta, an Indian-born emeritus professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, believes that so many categories inevitably “blend into others” and there will be “double counting.” He proposes that the index eliminate some categories, and that its creators develop a methodology for weighting them based on a defined set of priorities.
Lately, the debate over priorities within the foundation board has accelerated, because the index’s recent scores show that Tunisia was the eighth-best-governed country in Africa, and Egypt the ninth. Both scored well in measures of infrastructure, education, and health care—while scoring poorly on political participation and human rights. Speaking of the people’s revolt in North Africa, Mary Robinson says, “I think events there, and the influence on other countries, strengthen the case for giving more weight to these issues.” Ibrahim acknowledges the imperfections in his system: “You can fail in one area—human rights and corruption—and yet succeed.” But, he says, “it is not an index of democracy. It is an index of everything.”
Regardless of how the scoring works, the index is profoundly influential. It has “a huge impact” on how aid is distributed, the U.S.A.I.D. administrator Shah says. He relies on the index as a “serious determinant” in investing U.S.A.I.D.’s six-and-a-half-billion-dollar African-aid budget. He adds that the social impact within Africa may be even greater because it encourages countries to compete with each other. This, Shah adds, “is just brilliant.” For example, Kenya was unhappy when it ranked twenty-seventh while neighboring Tanzania came in sixteenth. Rwanda complained about its ranking while, this past fall, the President of Sierra Leone spoke before the U.N. and, citing the index, boasted about his “significant leap forward in democratic governance.” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former finance and foreign-affairs minister of Nigeria, and today a managing director for the World Bank, overseeing all of Africa, says, “Among African policymakers, no one is not aware of the Ibrahim Index and Prize.” When the index appears, each fall, the media in most African nations report the results. ElBaradei calls the index “a way to name and shame—but also to recognize achievement.”
The index has helped to change the conversation about how the West should assist developing countries. It used to be all about money; now it’s also about governance and private-sector growth. Joaquim Chissano told me that the prize and the index “make people speak about issues of governance.” And there has been a change in anti-poverty organizations as well. “I met Mo because our organization started to realize the importance of economic growth,” Bono says. “Activists like me tend to underestimate this.” The private sector was often seen as exploitative. Nonprofit organizations focussed on how much money government spent, not on how effectively government spent it.
There is, of course, no unanimity about aid priorities or even the importance of foreign aid. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, founded the Millennium Promise, in 2005, with the aim of slashing extreme poverty by 2015, a goal endorsed by nearly two hundred nations. This goal would be achieved, in large measure, by boosting foreign aid. Sachs wrote in his 2005 book, “The End of Poverty,” that “Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor.” Ibrahim emphasizes the opposite: Africans are poor because their governance is poor.
People accept Ibrahim’s bluntness on the subject of aid, as with so many other issues, because of his charm, Mary Robinson says. His friend Mohamed ElBaradei adds, “They know he does not have a hidden agenda. He’s not trying to make money. He’s not running for office.” ElBaradei adds that Ibrahim “has one foot in the East and one foot in the West. He is in many ways a contrarian in Western society, but also in Eastern society.”
in mid-November, Ibrahim organized a conference in Mauritius. His office paid for a hundred rooms at two hotels and bought airfare for the participants. Board members are paid thirty thousand dollars to attend four board meetings annually. Before the gathering, Ibrahim explained his immodest goals: “We hope to have a good conversation and try to reach some clear ideas about how to approach regional integration in Africa, and how we can ignite the imagination of the people in Africa.” He was scheduled to fly from London on Wednesday afternoon, but he missed the flight. Ibrahim arrived late Thursday and overslept on Friday. (“We’re waiting for Mo” is a running joke among associates.)
At the convention center on Saturday night, Ibrahim stood below a large sign that read “THE MO IBRAHIM FOUNDATION.” He began to talk extemporaneously about the continent’s abundant resources and poor governance. He then noted that no one had won his prize for two years, saying, simply, “This is a prize for excellence in leadership.” Ibrahim described a press conference that had been held after he announced that no award would be given in 2010. “Journalists asked me, with a smirk on their faces, ‘Were you guys saying there are no good African leaders?’ I said, ‘Hold on. This prize is for excellent leadership, for people who transformed their countries. I will go back to my prize committee and recommend that this prize, which was not offered this year, will be offered to the European leader who came to office in the last ten years and transformed his or her country. Can you please give me a name?’ “ Ibrahim smiled broadly as the audience burst into applause.
He went on to describe a new foundation fellowship. Every year for the next ten years, three Mo Ibrahim fellows will be chosen, to be mentored by, and work directly for, the heads of three institutions—the African Development Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the Economic Commission for Africa. Each fellow will be paid a six-figure salary by the foundation. These organizations, he said, “eat our lunch and we don’t know how these guys fix things. We want to put our spies in there!” Again, the audience laughed, and applauded.
The program, which was televised in more than a dozen countries, moved along so briskly that it ended ten minutes before the appointed hour. This prompted Angélique Kidjo, one of the night’s musical headliners, to get up and sing a rousing song. Ibrahim then bounded back onstage to fill the remaining time with impassioned remarks about Sudan. His country will soon divide itself politically, he said: “What we hope to have is an amicable divorce—for the sake of the children.” He expressed hope that “one day we’ll come back as a united Sudan.” His voice breaking, he concluded, “I’m sorry, I’m Sudanese, and I just couldn’t speak on this occasion without raising that issue.”
Earlier in the day, Ibrahim and his daughter, Hadeel, who is the director of strategy and external relations at the foundation, had argued about how long the events would run; Ibrahim had insisted that they might not fill the allotted hour; Hadeel and several board members said that they would. After the speech, Ibrahim stepped outside, saw me, and could not resist saying with a chuckle, “See, I was right to ask, ‘What if it takes less than an hour?’ “ After he sauntered back inside to lead the gathering in an explosion of clapping and dancing alongside Angélique and her band, Hadeel came outside and said, “I won’t hear the end of this.”
The next day, Ibrahim hosted four panels of eminent African public officials and economists to discuss issues ranging from ethnic conflict and civil war, to poor governance, to whether the small countries of Africa need to emulate the European Union and unite economically. Ibrahim announced that at the end of the four sessions the chairman of each panel would report on its recommended “solutions,” but it turned out that the event’s structure made it impossible to actually reach conclusions. Each panelist just gave a speech of ten minutes or so; then the moderator would call on the next person. There was no conversation and no one addressed, disputed, or refined anything that anyone else had said.
When the sessions ended, Ibrahim appeared at the lectern alone and said that he would try to summarize what he declared to be the day’s conclusions. “We need to have a plan, an action plan,” he said, waving a silver pen in his right hand like an orchestra conductor. He then enumerated fourteen bullet points, sounding more and more like an activist, not an analyst, as he went. “Let us take action!” he said, to push investment in Africa’s infrastructure. The idea of a single Pan-African Stock Exchange, which was cited by one panelist, is an “idea I very much support.”
That evening, Ibrahim scheduled a press conference at the Meridien Hotel’s conference center. There were about a dozen reporters in the room, none of whom had been invited to the panel discussions. He scanned his notes and repeated many of the same points he had cited at the end of the conference, describing them as the conclusions of the forum. An Ibrahim Foundation press release declared that the Mauritius forum “closed with an action plan,” and the papers duly reported the same thing.
Some members of Ibrahim’s board are uneasy with his freelancing. When he speaks out against atrocities in Darfur or Sudan, or when he unilaterally decides to endorse “an action plan,” is he speaking for the foundation? Mary Robinson, who admires him, says that what Ibrahim did after the forum is consonant with what he does with his own board: “He’s not the perfect chairman. He tries to wrap things up before we’re ready sometimes. It’s a businessman’s approach.” She also worries that the foundation may no longer be able to “absorb his energy.” This may be why, she says, Ibrahim is becoming more of “a political entrepreneur.” In recent years, he has joined the boards of ONE, the Coalition for Dialogue in Africa, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the International Crisis Group, and the oversight board of the Natural Resource Charter. The foundation board member Mamphela Ramphele, who thinks highly of Ibrahim, described him as full of “passion,” “impatience,” and “bluntness.” But she worries about the attention he attracts. “I am against celebrity,” she says. “I hope he does not fall victim to this deadly sin.”
After the participants and most of the conference-center audience had left, Kofi Annan sat, surrounded by a sea of empty chairs, and spoke with me about his friend. “To some extent he was moonlighting,” Annan said, smiling. “But that’s Mo, too! That’s part of his personality.”
In late February, a month after the removal of Ben Ali in Tunisia, a week after citizens in Egypt forced Hosni Mubarak to step down, and a day after a desperate Muammar Qaddafi ordered his Army, Air Force, and militias to shoot scores of protesters, I reached Ibrahim on his mobile phone, in the South of France. As we talked about the protests and the tumult engulfing his continent, it became clear that, at that moment, the work of his that was changing Africa the fastest wasn’t the prize, the index, or the conferences with the illusory action plans.
For a century and a half, he said, we relied on a wired telephone system. Yet in just ten years mobile phones have become dominant. “And it is not just a phone,” he went on. “It is a camera. E-mail. Videos. It changes life everywhere. In repressive societies, control over communications channels were held by government. Mobile phones are a fantastic tool to break that monopoly. It is not just for when people go out on the street. They are swapping stories and sharing what is going on, who is corrupt, and that builds up a level of consciousness among people. It helps them fight back.”
I asked whether he had foreseen that what he did in business might become a weapon to achieve better government.
“No, I wish I had,” he said, laughing. “We never imagined the magnitude of that development. I wish I could say I’m so smart.”
Ibrahim knows that technology does not exclusively push society in the direction of greater freedom and openness. Soldiers who shoot demonstrators can plan their assaults over mobile phones, Egyptian authorities found an “off” switch to silence the Internet, and protesters can be tracked by their phones. Ibrahim also knows that the gains made by advocates for openness and democracy can vanish quickly. Nonetheless, Ibrahim is proud that citizens in Tunisia and Egypt used their mobile phones to plan demonstrations and communicate strategy through calls, e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter. A cell-phone picture, taken in a morgue, of Khaled Said, a businessman who was beaten to death by Egyptian security police, was posted on a Facebook page—We Are All Khaled Said—that helped spark protesters. “Most of the pictures coming from Libya are from people using their mobile phones,” Ibrahim said. “In Libya, when the cameras of the BBC and CNN were not allowed, people’s mobile cameras worked.” He believes that the people in the street put Western and other powerful nations on the spot, compelling them to choose between their deeds (support for dictators) and their words (support for democracy).
One day, when Ibrahim seemed in a contemplative mood, reflecting on his mobile-phone and good-governance efforts, I asked what he would like his legacy to be. Without hesitation, he said, “I’d like to be remembered as a good African boy who didn’t forget his people.”
YAW 7 years ago
Francis, good that you mentioned in your own comment about the caption, "animals of communication"...of which you are certainly a communicator. I can as sure you that, your madness is beyond treatment, you can try the best Ho ... read full comment
Francis, good that you mentioned in your own comment about the caption, "animals of communication"...of which you are certainly a communicator. I can as sure you that, your madness is beyond treatment, you can try the best Hospital in the World!
francis kwarteng 7 years ago
Prof Lungu,
I hope you had already taken a close look at the methodology for computing the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), particularly the section on Sustainable Economic Opportunity (with its attendant four m ... read full comment
Prof Lungu,
I hope you had already taken a close look at the methodology for computing the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), particularly the section on Sustainable Economic Opportunity (with its attendant four major sub-divisons):
1)Public Management
2)Business Environment
3)Infrastructure
4)Rural Sector
I am talking about the first two (there are ways, direct and indirect, the Foundation measures such bad deals). Accountability under "Safety & Rule of Law" also takes a look at some of these questions.
Thanks.
aikins 7 years ago
Stop fooling around, can't you see that nobody has time to respond to your stupidity. By the way, Who is going to pay you for such nonsense articles since your paymasters are going to opposition and the selfish mahama that I ... read full comment
Stop fooling around, can't you see that nobody has time to respond to your stupidity. By the way, Who is going to pay you for such nonsense articles since your paymasters are going to opposition and the selfish mahama that I know will never give you money from his own pocket even though he has stolen enough from this great country of ours.
ADJOA WANGARA 7 years ago
Kwarteng, Mr. Bad English aka cut & paste...where did you learn this stupid English "...also takes a look at some of these..." (read your own silly comment above)
Kwarteng, you are simply a disaster and a pure same to huma ... read full comment
Kwarteng, Mr. Bad English aka cut & paste...where did you learn this stupid English "...also takes a look at some of these..." (read your own silly comment above)
Kwarteng, you are simply a disaster and a pure same to humanity...not to talk about Ghana. "Why are you always forcing yourself to be there...where as you are not there"? Kwarteng get it that, it"s not just about what you post for publication "but" obviously it's all about what it entails, the content! ...in your case, you makes absolutely zero sense in all your write-ups.
Prof Lungu 7 years ago
OK!
Again, it is Mo Ibrahim's money!
So, from our paper a year ago, we could argue that it is a poorly conceptualized goal, but with good methodology.
No doubt, African scholars and academicians of public administr ... read full comment
OK!
Again, it is Mo Ibrahim's money!
So, from our paper a year ago, we could argue that it is a poorly conceptualized goal, but with good methodology.
No doubt, African scholars and academicians of public administration and so forth can use the indices, if the data are made available, and updated - over time.
But, the award!
Of what use are they to the vast majority of Africans, at this point?
For all that money, how many Africans are being inspired by those awards, even in Mozambique, in Botswana? Or, the "threat" to withhold as they see fit?
Wont you agree there are potentially more African-centered individuals all over Africa (even in Equatorial Guinea, Chad, etc.), ordinary people who have a better potential to inspire even more Africans, if their stories are known and told, and those same people are rewarded in even smaller bundles of cash?
One of the cartoons in the New Yorker article has this:
“It’s nowhere near as far away as we thought!”
Well, maybe that is something we could say of the Mo Ibrahim prize, half of the time, at least.
And if, Mo Ibrahim wants to be remembered as, "...a good African boy who didn’t forget his people", how come the remarkable lack of attention to history, to people like Nkrumah who, again, never stole a cedi/dollar from Ghanaians, who stature in World Affairs, if properly leveraged as we've discussed before, could inspire millions of Africans to more progressive ideas?
Greetings.
Kojo T. 7 years ago
Lungu, I am not very sure you are really a Prefessor. Your thinking is very low to be a Prof.
Lungu, I am not very sure you are really a Prefessor. Your thinking is very low to be a Prof.
da prof 7 years ago
Yo proph listen,Akufo Ado had said it,if you have any idea please come on board to promote Ghana future rather than you doubting what Nana has said
Yo proph listen,Akufo Ado had said it,if you have any idea please come on board to promote Ghana future rather than you doubting what Nana has said
AUTHENTIC ANDY-K 7 years ago
Can't the ilk and likes of Lungu and Kwarteng just write a simple comment to an article instead of writing a whole garbage of book?
Can't the ilk and likes of Lungu and Kwarteng just write a simple comment to an article instead of writing a whole garbage of book?
Warrior 7 years ago
Big , big English Francis , come down if u want your so-called message of goodwill to the people of Ghana Honestly , I did not read column as I got bored along the line
!!!!!
Boring stuff !!!
Big , big English Francis , come down if u want your so-called message of goodwill to the people of Ghana Honestly , I did not read column as I got bored along the line
!!!!!
Boring stuff !!!
Sam Joe 7 years ago
I can bett with my last coin with you that, Kwarteng is not a normal entity, if you like a nonentity.
I can bett with my last coin with you that, Kwarteng is not a normal entity, if you like a nonentity.
macho man 7 years ago
the money is there so i think it can be done
the money is there so i think it can be done
Onnidin 7 years ago
The only thing that will let Ghana develop is a change of attitude towards all things that make development of a country possible. I am a an autopilot voter and my vote will continue to be on autopilot. That makes sense demo ... read full comment
The only thing that will let Ghana develop is a change of attitude towards all things that make development of a country possible. I am a an autopilot voter and my vote will continue to be on autopilot. That makes sense democratically. But until we all decide to act to help Amagh develop, elected president can do that.
Mr Bond 7 years ago
Francis Kwateng ,I don't fear huu and if you err I will tell you right in your face and I will not beat around the bush.You are educated fool without apology.All your nonsense you are writing cannot change the status quo and ... read full comment
Francis Kwateng ,I don't fear huu and if you err I will tell you right in your face and I will not beat around the bush.You are educated fool without apology.All your nonsense you are writing cannot change the status quo and Ghana destiny in Nana Ado's hand will go back to your dim god most corrupt president in the history of Ghana John Dramani Mahama.Just wait and cross your arms to chest and see what Nana Ado can do.When are you going to be mature?Are your Kids proud about you writing all this nonsense?
NDC FOOTSOLDIER in Europe 7 years ago
Bush man, idiot coconut man and stupid kwasiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa man
Bush man, idiot coconut man and stupid kwasiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa man
NDC FOOTSOLDIER in Europe 7 years ago
God bless NANA ADDO with wisdom which King SOLOMON ask from GOD to govern our their nation .Good people of Ghana we must only have patients for President elect to be sworn in as the tradition of Ghana use to be. God bless Gha ... read full comment
God bless NANA ADDO with wisdom which King SOLOMON ask from GOD to govern our their nation .Good people of Ghana we must only have patients for President elect to be sworn in as the tradition of Ghana use to be. God bless Ghana for ever and ever . AMEN
king shaka 7 years ago
its worrying that what the people really want is been questioned by an elitist who knows what the people want after sitting out there in America. guess he would have also loved Hillary but the people choose Trump
its worrying that what the people really want is been questioned by an elitist who knows what the people want after sitting out there in America. guess he would have also loved Hillary but the people choose Trump
Pius 7 years ago
yes Akufo- Addo may be the change Ghanaians want, but it's only time that will tell if Akufo-Addo was exactly the change Ghanaians wanted
yes Akufo- Addo may be the change Ghanaians want, but it's only time that will tell if Akufo-Addo was exactly the change Ghanaians wanted
samyel ayaa 7 years ago
nana god bless you and do you like solomon
nana god bless you and do you like solomon
samyel ayaa 7 years ago
nana afofu addo god blees you
nana afofu addo god blees you
KOB 7 years ago
Francis you people have had your turn and made many miserable whilst lots of nonentities became filthy rich and arrogant. God willing and with the support of all of us we will really see real change. Who wants this kind of li ... read full comment
Francis you people have had your turn and made many miserable whilst lots of nonentities became filthy rich and arrogant. God willing and with the support of all of us we will really see real change. Who wants this kind of life we have endured under NDC. Give us a break!!!!
Neither NDC Nor NPP 7 years ago
Francis, you are truly to be praised for raising awareness, bringing a better understanding of political processes and history, inspiring reflection and motivating action.
Unfortunately, the Left and generally-speaking pro ... read full comment
Francis, you are truly to be praised for raising awareness, bringing a better understanding of political processes and history, inspiring reflection and motivating action.
Unfortunately, the Left and generally-speaking progressives are nowhere to be found. Change does not come from a vacuum! Activism is required. We need progressive media to counter the lies of the revolving kleptomaniacal elites of power, to neutralize the dangerous neoconial / neoliberal indoctrination from both local and foreign sources, and to recondition the minds of the people with progressive social ideas.
Ghana has slipped into the dark ages of phony Christianity and the most crooked manipulations ("I command the cedi to rise in Jesus' name!"). There are preachers everywhere. We are back to Tsarist Russia before the revolution when the illiterate peasant masses had only the church as their frame of existential reference and to ease their pain. The majority of the populace has lost hope. "Fama Nyame" - Leave it to God - rules. Ethnocentrism is being championed openly. The trailblazers of Africa are lost!
Thanks to your consistent, mind-provoking writings, which are sowing the seeds of awareness, there is hope for change.
A people that understands what is going on, knows what it wants, and fights consistently to achieve them can never be defeated! Forward ever!
Bonso 7 years ago
We in NPP refuse to read your boring, monotonous cut and paste drivel. You are in tears. What a waste of mind! It's complete bonkers.
We in NPP refuse to read your boring, monotonous cut and paste drivel. You are in tears. What a waste of mind! It's complete bonkers.
The Don 7 years ago
Well ,lets see !What i can say is that the good people of Ghana are ready to wait awhile for the fufillment of their dreams.If you believe in a dream,it will surely come true.
Well ,lets see !What i can say is that the good people of Ghana are ready to wait awhile for the fufillment of their dreams.If you believe in a dream,it will surely come true.
A change is in two forms:positive and negative.Unrealistic policy will bring a negative change.Do not deceive Ghanaians.Think about the number of years you will take to realise these policies.Talking, Talking and Talking.
The most stupid article.
NANA AKUFFU ADDO'S LEGACY: 1. MOVE THE CAPITAL AWAY FROM DIRTY ACCRA. 2. WE NEED STREET NAMES, NUMBERED BUILDINGS, VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL STREETS AND POSTAL CODES FOR ALL CONSTITUENCIES N DISTRICTS. THIS WILL ENSURE EFFICIEN ...
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Forget it!,
just make it short & easy for him, wai,
THE FOLLOWING MUST BE NANA'S 5 TOP PRIORTIES:
1> fresh water for entire Ghana
2> health post & centres in every village in Ghana,
3> power & energy supply: lights eve ...
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These are prophecies of "Prophet" Francis Kwarteng . There is no need for insults but patience .
Kwarteng Francis, you have the liberty to write your nonsense to any volumes you desire till Thy Kingdom Come. His Excellency President - Elect Akuffo Addo will surely be President from January 7 and you can go burn the Atlan ...
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Seriously, what is this writer who called himself Francis Kwarteng trying hard to achieve with these incoherent series of writings? I believe I'm well-read and more educated than he may be, but I don't really understand his a ...
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My sentiments exactly!!
Mr. Kwarteng, in one of your spectacularly incoherent pieces, I was charitable enough to advise you to invest some time in studying the rules of paragraphing and coherent writing, to which you retorted, rather absurdly, that ...
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Nii Saban, you are such a refined specimen. Others wouldn't have your temperament in responding to Francis Kwarteng, if that really is his name. I wouldn't be so charitable to his dribble.
So what. I am waiting for my $1 million for K.E.E.A, my free school, my dam for my Village, free healthcare, free house, free free wife if possible, my factory for my Village. However, did UP/NPP got somebody for the thank yo ...
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What a load of rubbish from a sore loser..
Go to your Togo with your Treatise of Doom!!! We know that...
G-od
H-as
A-nointed
N-ana
A-ddo!!!
Nana will succeed with God on his side!
It has come to our notice that students are running away from his class. This may mean, among other things, that he has lost touch with the student body for lack of professionalism. And in America the no nonsense faculty boa ...
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Nii Teiko, I can bet my last dime that Kwarteng is not a professor of anything. In fact, his writings depict somebody who may inexorably be trudging down the stages of mental atrophy.
Just undertake a cursory reading of th ...
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That Francis Kwarteng is a villige-boy, who has happen to be in the US of A, stay in one appartment with her sister in Maryland-USA...and not a Professor as some ignorant People may think.
Interesting, I suspect like a few other readers,fail to follow your narrative in a coherent manner.
Your view on aid for example is too simple because aid itself is a far more complex issue than you put it.
Your article sma ...
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To say....
That said, we want to be careful not to totally accept Mo Ibrahim and his "prize" as perhaps the best promise for leadership and development Africans can have.
Mo Ibrahim a ward is an a ward that will never ever happen to any generation of the NDC Party...and that is as sure as a mouse in the Church.
By the way....for those who have missed it..........!
When history (African history) matters!
Steve Biko is the face of the GOOGLE, on this, his 70th birthday anniversary.
See today, only at: www.google.com/
Dear Prof Lungu,
Thanks again for your insightful insights.
Well, I am surprised the Mo Ibrahim Foundation did not offer any assistance to you as far as you say is concerned.
But I do know for a fact that Dr Mohamm ...
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Stop running your mouth, and write proper English...since when can you PUBLISH an article on Ghanaweb. Is it not that, you Post your clap to be published by the Editor of Ghanaweb, Francis Akoto? And it's very sad that your u ...
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Bokor, can you tell what went wrong for John Mahama's govt? You have been too silent on this!
Here is another one (There are more that Ibrahim has done and is still doing on the very things you said the Foundation did not do in your case. We shall save this for later.
Fortunately, though, the Foundation (and membe ...
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Francis, good that you mentioned in your own comment about the caption, "animals of communication"...of which you are certainly a communicator. I can as sure you that, your madness is beyond treatment, you can try the best Ho ...
read full comment
Prof Lungu,
I hope you had already taken a close look at the methodology for computing the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), particularly the section on Sustainable Economic Opportunity (with its attendant four m ...
read full comment
Stop fooling around, can't you see that nobody has time to respond to your stupidity. By the way, Who is going to pay you for such nonsense articles since your paymasters are going to opposition and the selfish mahama that I ...
read full comment
Kwarteng, Mr. Bad English aka cut & paste...where did you learn this stupid English "...also takes a look at some of these..." (read your own silly comment above)
Kwarteng, you are simply a disaster and a pure same to huma ...
read full comment
OK!
Again, it is Mo Ibrahim's money!
So, from our paper a year ago, we could argue that it is a poorly conceptualized goal, but with good methodology.
No doubt, African scholars and academicians of public administr ...
read full comment
Lungu, I am not very sure you are really a Prefessor. Your thinking is very low to be a Prof.
Yo proph listen,Akufo Ado had said it,if you have any idea please come on board to promote Ghana future rather than you doubting what Nana has said
Can't the ilk and likes of Lungu and Kwarteng just write a simple comment to an article instead of writing a whole garbage of book?
Big , big English Francis , come down if u want your so-called message of goodwill to the people of Ghana Honestly , I did not read column as I got bored along the line
!!!!!
Boring stuff !!!
I can bett with my last coin with you that, Kwarteng is not a normal entity, if you like a nonentity.
the money is there so i think it can be done
The only thing that will let Ghana develop is a change of attitude towards all things that make development of a country possible. I am a an autopilot voter and my vote will continue to be on autopilot. That makes sense demo ...
read full comment
Francis Kwateng ,I don't fear huu and if you err I will tell you right in your face and I will not beat around the bush.You are educated fool without apology.All your nonsense you are writing cannot change the status quo and ...
read full comment
Bush man, idiot coconut man and stupid kwasiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa man
God bless NANA ADDO with wisdom which King SOLOMON ask from GOD to govern our their nation .Good people of Ghana we must only have patients for President elect to be sworn in as the tradition of Ghana use to be. God bless Gha ...
read full comment
its worrying that what the people really want is been questioned by an elitist who knows what the people want after sitting out there in America. guess he would have also loved Hillary but the people choose Trump
yes Akufo- Addo may be the change Ghanaians want, but it's only time that will tell if Akufo-Addo was exactly the change Ghanaians wanted
nana god bless you and do you like solomon
nana afofu addo god blees you
Francis you people have had your turn and made many miserable whilst lots of nonentities became filthy rich and arrogant. God willing and with the support of all of us we will really see real change. Who wants this kind of li ...
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Francis, you are truly to be praised for raising awareness, bringing a better understanding of political processes and history, inspiring reflection and motivating action.
Unfortunately, the Left and generally-speaking pro ...
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We in NPP refuse to read your boring, monotonous cut and paste drivel. You are in tears. What a waste of mind! It's complete bonkers.
Well ,lets see !What i can say is that the good people of Ghana are ready to wait awhile for the fufillment of their dreams.If you believe in a dream,it will surely come true.