Teamwork should be Africa's prize

When he finally strode on to the pitch this week, the stadium was drowned in applause. Africa's leading player, this year's African Footballer of the Year, Didier Drogba, wasn't cleared to play until the last minute. But his appearance at Port Elizabeth Stadium with his arm in a cast was enough to leave Ivory Coast fans confident that he alone could turn around their lacklustre performance. He couldn't.

It's bad form to mix politics and sport. Yet in the same week the World Cup started, the world's richest prize was also up for grabs in Africa - and yet no African was able to claim it. The reason why matters, as much for football fans as for the continent. Start with the prize. The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership is the world's most valuable, worth US$5 million over 10 years, plus $200,000 a year after that. The criteria are strict and the prize can only be awarded to democratically-elected leaders who leave office after serving their term within the limits of the country's constitution. Having previously honoured former presidents of Mozambique and Botswana, this week, for the second year in a row, it was not awarded.

To most observers, the reason is obvious. Africa is the lost continent, a hinterland of starvation and infection. Yet that image is woefully incorrect. The continent is thriving - from Kenyan wind farms, to Nigerian entrepreneurs, to South African banks, the economic outlook has rarely looked as positive. The continent's economy is expected to grow up to six per cent this year, despite the downturn.

Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese entrepreneur who founded the prize, is living proof of the continent's potential: he made his fortune with a company that operated primarily in Africa. But even as the continent's economy speeds up, its politics appear to have stalled. To see why, take the five (sub-Saharan) African nations in the World Cup: South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Ivory Coast. Every single one has been dominated by one political party for more than a decade.

True, that situation isn't entirely unusual, even in mature democracies - both France and Britain have been dominated by one political party for most of the past decade. But neither of those parties could hope to poll the 60 per cent-plus support these African political parties enjoy on a regular basis. Moreover in some countries, such as South Africa and Nigeria, the dominant party exerts such influence it is hard to conceive of a transfer of power. The African National Congress in South Africa has never been out of power since the country became a democracy in 1994.

It is not much more heartening elsewhere. In Ethiopia, the political party of the prime minister Meles Zenawi won a commanding victory in last month's parliamentary elections - his party hasn't been out of power since 1991. In Uganda, the president Yoweri Museveni hasn't left office since 1986. With such a situation, it's hardly surprising that the prize hasn't been awarded. No point asking where all the good leaders have gone - the problem is, they've never left. Mo Ibrahim acknowledged as much this week, explaining that the prize was not awarded because it has to go to an African leader who leaves office - and no African leaders left office last year. Yet what the Ibrahim Prize really wants to do is not just reward good leadership, but encourage good governance. And that's where it gets hard.

For in the swirl of theories about governance, there has yet to emerge a simple, proven way to clean politics. Good governance is a combination of many factors - social, economic, legal and political. It requires not just efforts in African countries, but political will abroad. Foreign nations who trade with Africa have to ensure their companies don't pay bribes, or, if they do, that governments clamp down on them legally. Governments are reluctant: as with the arms trade, the justification runs that there is always someone else willing to pay the bribe.

Worse, good governance is not high on the priority list of many of Africa's leaders - and with good reason, given the wounds Africa needs to recover from. In the past two decades, conflict has torn across the continent. It has been just 16 years since the Rwandan genocide, the killing of 800,000 people in a hundred days. Liberia is coming out of the shadow of the civil war that tore the country apart in the 1990s, killing 250,000 people. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is only just emerging from what has been dubbed Africa's world war, the Second Congo War, a conflict that involved eight countries and killed millions of people. It took Europe, one of the richest parts of the world, decades to rebuild itself after the Second World War; the Congo has only been stable since 2003. No other continent faces challenges on that scale.

In such circumstances, the priorities of most leaders, even the most selfless, are not necessarily the priorities of the watching world. Leadership has to take second place to governing. As corrupt as most Africans think their politicians are, it is the case that many, many leaders across the vast continent are trying to make the best of a bad system. And that goes to the heart of the matter: that, for too many Africans in too many places, clean government is a low priority, far below food, clothing and shelter. Clean government matters - but clean water matters more.

The dilemma was summed up last month by Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, when he told a newspaper: "It doesn't matter how much you talk about democracy or human rights. Tell me about a family who spends the whole night looking at each other and wondering whether they will have something to eat. Are they thinking about anything else? They are just not listening." The leadership prize, then, is more of an aspiration than an answer, but aspiration can be an important motivator - especially to those just below the leader. Africa has a strong tradition of political parties: it now needs good team players, a tradition of activism that creates layers of leaders. Think back to Didier Drogba on the pitch and it becomes clear that no matter how much you reward the front man (and Drogba is estimated to earn $150,000 per week), he needs a strong team behind him.

The Ibrahim Foundation has recognised this, moving in a new direction and creating a Leadership Fellows programme to "identify and prepare" the next generation of African leaders. It is a vital signal: for as important as it is to encourage the few at the top to step down, it is essential to prepare those further down to step up. Faisal al Yafai is a journalist. He received the Ibn Battuta Award for Media in London this spring and is a Churchill Fellow for 2009/2010