Julie McLaughlin

There is something very appealing about the frankness of former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano. When a BBC radio interviewer told him recently that he was being considered for the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, he replied: "It's worth how much? Five million dollars? You're sure it's five million?"

Yes, I'm sure, said the interviewer. What would you do with it? "I would live better, of course," said Chissano. "I would not be shy." No guff about donating it all to starving children or other good works. He is still working for the welfare of Africans — when he was declared the winner last week, they couldn't find him because he was somewhere in northern Uganda as a United Nations special envoy trying to broker peace between the government and a very nasty rebel movement — but he deserves to live better.

There were the usual insta-critics who condemned Mo Ibrahim for giving the money to an individual rather than building hospitals in Africa, or who were offended by the "racist" notion that African leaders need to be rewarded with special prizes for doing what they ought to do anyway. The media needs two sides to every story, and everybody gets their 15 seconds in the spotlight. But Ibrahim is right to offer the prize, and it may do some good.

I first met Mo Ibrahim about a year and a half ago, shortly after he sold his African-based telecommunications company Celtel to Kuwait's MTC and became a billionaire in the process. The Sudanese-born British citizen had looked for something useful to do with his time and his considerable pile of money, and one solution was the creation of this new prize, the biggest in the world: half a million dollars per year for 10 years, and $200,000 a year for the rest of the winner's life. (The Nobel Peace Price is only a flat $1.5 million.)

Why give so much money to African presidents? Surely they must have enough already? Well, no, they don't. Not if they're honest, at any rate — and that's one big reason why so few of them are.

In the vast majority of African countries, it is politically impossible to pay presidents a salary and a pension that will enable them to live comfortably in retirement, let alone go on playing a useful role in public life. When average incomes are a few hundred dollars a year, or at most a thousand or two, you just cannot pay the president several hundred times as much. At least you cannot do it in a democratic system: any moderately competent opposition would condemn the president as a cynical profiteer totally out of touch with ordinary people, and the mud would stick.

The problem is not so bad when the president is still in office: the presidential mansion, the official limos and drivers, the entertainment expenses and the airline tickets all come for free. So do the bodyguards. But if a president retires, or holds a free election and loses, all that vanishes, and nothing takes its place.

Even the ex-presidents of rich countries sometimes face this problem, as witness Bill Clinton's constant presence on the lecture circuit, but the dilemma is far more acute for Africans. As Mo Ibrahim put it, an African leader coming to the end of his term has only three alternatives: steal enough money to finance his retirement; manipulate the rules to stay in office indefinitely; or live in relative poverty.

So Ibrahim decided to offer them a fourth option: an annual prize open to all African leaders who were elected democratically, served their permitted terms under the constitution, and have retired in the past three years. The prize is not rich enough to dissuade the crooks from looting the state treasury — corrupt African leaders frequently steal a great deal more than $5 million — but it will reward honest men who have served their countries well with a decent life in retirement.

Given current conditions in many African countries, the panel of notables who chose this year's winner (chaired by former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan) had to be realistic in applying Ibrahim's criteria. Joaquim Chissano was not originally elected at all: he took over the presidency of a Marxist one-party state after the previous president died in a plane crash in 1988. Mozambique was also mired in a long civil war, and critics of the regime were lucky if they only went to jail.

But Chissano made peace with the rebels in 1992, and let them run in a free election in 1995 in which he won the presidency legitimately. He dismantled the apparatus of repression, won another tem in 2000, and retired in 2005 even though the constitution allowed him a third term. He also set the country on the road to economic growth, though it remains desperately poor.

"Africa is rich — really rich," said Mo Ibrahim in an interview with the New York Times. "It's really a wonderful continent. What we need to do now is to enforce good governance, and it's happening, perhaps not as quickly as I would like. All we need to do is push."

Amen to that.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.