The Mo Ibrahim Foundation

2007 Ibrahim Index of African Governance

Safety and Security

Without Safety and Security, good governance and the provision of all political goods, is impossible. Being safe and secure, in other words, is a prime political good. Security refers to a nation-state’s monopoly of violence. If there are insurgencies within the state, violence against the regime in power, or rebellions against authority, the nation-state is neither safe nor secure for its people. Likewise, if the state is invaded from outside or has porous borders, the government of the nation-state cannot provide, as nation-states are mandated to do, a safe and secure environment for the pursuit of individual or group endeavors within the nation-state. Nation-states that are unable to meet these tests of safety and security are failed or collapsed states. Others, where the supply of these political goods is weak or questionable, are weak or failing nation-states. Strong nation-states do not exhibit such problems.

Nor are the citizens of a modern nation-state safe or secure if the government in power cannot guarantee their personal security. Citizens demand to be free of mugging, car jacking, violent crime, and homicide. Thus, personal security is the second major component of the political good of safety and security. Countries with lower crime rates are supplying greater quantities and qualities of the safety segment of the political good of safety and security than those states where crime is rampant. In order to disaggregate this critical and overarching political good, the Index of African Governance analyzes a nation-state’s National Security and its Public Safety and weights each of the two sub-categories two-thirds and one-third, respectively, in a total country score for the category of Safety and Security. There are seven critical sub-sub-categories (SSCs) which are measured to create each national profile.

Rule of law, Transparency and Corruption

Governments and governance cannot exist or function without the political good called Rule of Law. Such a designation refers not necessarily to the Anglo-Saxon common law, the Napoleonic Code, Islamic jurisprudential methods, or others, but rather to a codified, transparent method of adjudicating personal disputes of all kinds, formal and informal contractual obligations, and disputes between citizens and the nation-state, without resort to violence. Thus, nation-states with enforceable codes of law, nation-states that have adhered to international conventions and legal obligations, and nation-states with judicial mechanisms free of state control have stronger rule of law regimes and supply larger amounts of the political good of Rule of Law.

This political good has three main components, all weighted equally in this Index of African Governance: Ratification of Critical Legal Norms; Judicial Independence and Efficiency; and Corruption. Although this Index prefers empirical, objective, data on which to base its ratings of each of the three components, we are compelled this year to rely for some of our data on perceptually derived numbers.

As the term “rule of law” is used here it highlights “the idea of laws enacted—laid down, legislated—by an authoritative body.” The term is sometimes used also or instead to highlight human rights and democracy, the idea of “a higher notion of Law as binding because it is sound in principle. This broader second approach is addressed in the Index of African Governance under the category of “Participation and Human Rights.”

Participation and Human Rights

The political good of political freedom is essential to good governance. It includes Participation—the ability to contest elections freely; Respect for Basic Human Rights—all of the essential liberties and rights; and the Absence of Gender Discrimination. It is difficult to measure outcomes on human rights protection and promotion, and there are limited data available that cover all forty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Under other categories in this Index, different aspects of human rights are measured. In particular, these include economic and social rights under the category of Human Development and necessary components of the protection of human rights under the category of Rule of Law, Transparency, and Corruption.

In addition to gender-based discrimination, which is explicitly addressed in the third sub-category of this section, there are other forms of group-based discrimination, such as discrimination against ethnic groups and religious minorities. These forms of discrimination are addressed in this category particularly through coding on respect for universal human rights and, under Safety and Security, through coding on the existence or absence of intrastate (including ethnic) conflict.

Without these components of political freedom, many other political goods that collectively compose good governance are difficult to exercise. In our overall score for this particular category, we weight each of the three components equally.

Sustainable Economic Opportunity

Sustainable economic opportunity is an essential political good. Well-governed nation-states enable their citizens to pursue personal entrepreneurial goals and potentially prosper. They do so by providing regulatory frameworks conducive to such prosperity and by creating stable and forward-looking macroeconomic and fiscal policy environments that facilitate and encourage national and personal wealth creation. Arteries of commerce—a robust physical communications and transportation infrastructure—are also critical to the achievement of these national and personal objectives. Significant, too, is the extent to which African countries are safeguarding their environments. Doing so assists in sustaining economic opportunity. In order to measure the extent to which nation-states are providing this essential political good and its components, the Index of African Governance examines their twelve critical constituent parts, using twelve SSCs in four sub-categories:

Human Development

Governments are charged by their constituents with supplying the political good of effective human development. Everywhere, especially in Africa, citizens expect their governments to provide opportunities for educational advancement, health care and medical and sanitary services, and poverty mitigation and alleviation. The Index of African Governance Category for Human Development thus divides the overall political good of human development into those three components, for a total of twenty-one sub-sub-categories. By measuring each of the SSCs, and weighting each of the three groupings of SSCs equally, the Index arrives at a measurement of each of the components of Human Development and, overall, of Human Development as a major category of good or less good governance.