Editors Note

Africa taught the world a master class in revolution in 2011 with what has now come to be known as the Arab Spring.

It demonstrated the power of both the continent’s masses and its civil society with the revolutions that swept the Arab North. It was also the year when the continent’s potential for change shone brightly. Africa’s immense economic opportunities over which the Western world and the East desperately scramble, have become more evident, and the high number of democratic elections that took place suggests that there has been no despair in the quest for democracy.

The hopeful signs, however, should not blind anyone to the enormous challenges Africa faces — particularly the high price it pays for the lack of good leadership. While the continent had a record 19 elections, they were also an indicator of how easily progress can unravel. The 19 elections produced only seven newly elected leaders, and all the elections were marred by varying degrees of of irregularity.

Africa’s seeming inability to successfully transfer power without violence and mass controversy only points a finger at the poor, and often crooked, leadership which continues to plague the continent.

To compound the problem, the media is easily co-opted and controlled, making it quickly distrusted. Opposition groups are either fragmented or unwilling to participate in elections they know they will lose to state-sponsored rigging, and civil society’s opinion is often rendered redundant.

Nevertheless, there are a few gems. After a couple of years without a winner, the Mo Ibrahim Prize for good leadership was finally called back into action — Cape Verde’s former president, Pedro Pires, bagged the $5 million prize.

At Nation Media Group we feel we have a duty to the people of Africa to highlight the good, the bad and the ugly.

Our Africa project staffer, SAMANTHA SPOONER, has spent quite some time tracking reports of the political actions of Africa’s leaders in order to come up with our Second Annual African Leadership Scorecard.

With all the changes in government and revolutions, the 2011 index was going to be a tricky one. To maintain the broadness of the index, we continue to rely on a variety of measures to give a rounded evaluation of the leaders’ performance; the Mo Ibrahim Index of African governance, the Democracy Index, Freedom House’s Press Freedom Index, Transparency International’s Corruption Index and the United Nation’s Human Development Index. We then developed a Nation Media Group Index to complement the others that we chose. The final score on which the political leaders are judged is an average score of all these indices.