While the prize will help focus attention on how to improve Africa's leadership, it runs the risk of diverting attention from more critical institutional issues facing Africa's governance.
Leadership is not simply an act of personal heroism. It must be put in a proper institutional context. Africa needs to build strong institutions that can support democratic change, not simply rely on the serendipitous emergence of good leaders. Prizes of this kind should therefore be complemented by serious leadership training.
The UK helped Africa to develop its post-colonial public service by creating universities and other training programmes. This helped support heroic post-independent leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.
The age of democratisation demands such similar support but with a focus on strengthening the capacity to govern. But instead of building schools of government, the international community has focused largely on advocacy and electoral change. These are important steps in democratic change but insufficient to entrench democratic traditions.
Much of Africa currently holds multi-party elections. But parliaments are poorly supported. Elected leaders can hardly be effective representatives of their people. For example, many parliaments debate national budgets but they cannot influence their contents. They merely rubber-stamp proposals for the executive branch, many of which are discussed in advance with development partners.
Similarly, judicial offices remain under-funded and lack the administrative infrastructure to render justice in a fair and efficient way. They need to digitise their records but can hardly get the support to do so. The lack of administrative infrastructure reduces transparency, breeding corruption and other malpractices. All of this will reflect badly on leaders in power.
The prize serves a useful purpose in focusing attention on the need to improve governance in general and leadership in particular, but more needs to be done to help Africa build the institutional infrastructure needed to deepen democracy.