ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONS about billionaire Mo Ibrahim. One day last March, students crammed into the Great Hall at the University of Ghana to hear Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born billionaire who built one of the first mobile-phone networks in Africa. In his speech, he noted that while Africa is a very rich continent, it has the poorest people on earth. He blamed this state on “a catastrophic failure of leadership and governance…too many dictators, too many megalomaniacs, too many thieves, who bled this continent for their personal and family interest.” 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 offers 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. He has also created the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, a numerical ranking of Africa’s fifty-three governments. With citizen revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and elsewhere, Africa is undergoing perhaps its greatest political convulsion since the end of colonialism, and few private citizens have done as much in recent years as Ibrahim to push for the kind of democracy that people are demanding in the streets. Ibrahim’s message is that Africa needs to take responsibility for itself, and it needs to start by jettisoning its awful leaders. Ibrahim was born on May 3, 1946, in Northern Sudan. He attended Alexandria University, and, after getting his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, in 1981, he worked for British Telecom before founding his own consultancy, Mobile Systems International. In 2000, Ibrahim sold M.S.I. and focused on Celtel. By 2004, Celtel provided service to six million customers in thirteen countries. The next year, its revenues reached a billion dollars. The number of mobile phones in Africa has grown from fewer than four million in 1998 to more than four hundred million today, and the phones have created jobs and infrastructure. In 2006, Ibrahim unveiled the Ibrahim Prize. The Ibrahim Foundation has not granted a prize for the past two years, because the selection committee believed that no outgoing African head of state deserved it. Detractors describe the prize as a form of bribery, but Ibrahim rejects this claim. The Ibrahim Index of African Governance has “a huge impact” on how aid is distributed, according to the U.S.A.I.D. administrator Rajiv Shah, and it has helped change the conversation about how the West should assist developing countries. Describes a conference Ibrahim organized in Mauritius. Ibrahim knows that technology does not exclusively push society in the direction of greater freedom and openness, nonetheless he 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.

[read more: The New Yorker]