Ouch! Jonathan just missed $5m!

Iam sending a strongly worded letter of protest to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation for hastily awarding this year’s mouth-watering prize without properly evaluating all the eligible candidates. Why were they in haste to announce the award? The foundation announced on Monday that outgoing President of Namibia Hifikepunye Pohamba has won the Mo Ibrahim Prize for African leadership, the world’s most valuable individual award. This grey bearded former Namibian guerrilla will now pocket the $5m (£3.2m) prize. What will he even do with it?

My quarrel with the Mo Prize committee headed by the former Tanzanian Prime Minister Salim Ahmad Salim is that they did not wait a few more weeks to evaluate all the eligible candidates before they hastily awarded the prize to a Namibian. The award is given each year to an elected African leader who governed well, raised living standards of his countrymen and then left office. In the past they used to wait until a leader has returned safely to his home village before he gets the prize. This year they are in a hurry because no one won the prize four times in the last five years and people were beginning to say that old man Mo Ibrahim is cleverly conserving his money.

So they gave it to Pohamba who has not left office yet. How are they sure that he will not do something in his final days in office that could scuttle his previous eight year record? Anyway, that is not even the part that annoys me. It is that there are other outgoing African presidents who also need $5 million, like our own Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. Many Nigerians are saying that he will be heading to Otuoke side after March 28 so he needs a good parting gift.

What is it that they said Pohamba did? That he “cemented Namibia’s reputation as a well-governed, stable and inclusive democracy with strong media freedom and respect for human rights.” Only? That one is peanuts! Didn’t they hear about the Transformation Agenda that has turned Nigeria in five years from a basket case to a land of milk and honey? Mo Ibrahim should kindly retrieve his money from Pohamba and give it to the man of Goodluck. He may no longer sit atop the NNPC’s sieve-like accounts after May 29 so $5million can at least year .sustain Mama Peace’s wardrobes for a