Feb. 13, 2018 — Congratulations to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who retired in January 2018 after 12 years as President of Liberia, for winning the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. It is for this that the award, which pays $5 million, was originally established.
The Prize is a fascinating experiment. Some have criticized the fact that in a majority of years nobody has been found worthy. But I wrote a favorable evaluation in “The Ibrahim Prize for Excellence Among African Leaders,” published in 2014 in the African Policy Journal.
There I concluded with a prediction: “The Ibrahim Prize was established only in 2007. This means that, so far, the candidates have served most of their terms in office when the Prize did not yet exist and so could not have influenced their behavior. A leader elected in 2007 would not complete two five-year terms until 2017. If the experiment works, the main fruits will lie in the future.”