UPDATE: Check out the Mo Ibrahim Index of Governance here. The usually suspects – Botswana, Cape Verde and Mauritius –  lead the pack.

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The BBC reports:

Former Cape Verde President Pedro Verona Pires has been awarded this year’s $5m (£3.2m) Mo Ibrahim prize for good governance in Africa.

The prize committee said Mr Pires, who stepped down in August, had helped make the archipelago off the West African coast a “model of democracy, stability and increased prosperity”.

The prize is supposed to be awarded each year to a democratically elected leader who has voluntarily left office.

There has been no winner for two years. The committee said there had been no suitable candidate.

The $5m award, given over 10 years followed by $200,000 a year for life, is the world’s most valuable individual prize. The previous winners are Botswana’s President Festus Mogae and Mozambique’s Joaquim Chissano.

In case you are wondering why African incumbents – including Cameroon’s Paul Biya and Senegal’s Wade – do not find the world’s most valuable individual prize worth their time check out an earlier post in which I attempted to calculate the opportunity cost of accepting the award. Notice that my calculation did not factor in the probability of not winning the prize even after stepping down or that of winding up at the Hague or dead.

The prize is a nice carrot and is part of a larger and highly commendable, I should add, attempt at an ideational change on what it means to be a good president. But it almost naively assumes that the only reason autocrats stay in power beyond their “use by” date is for the money.

If that were the case Gbagbo and Gaddafi would surely have done the right thing.

If I were on the committee I would ask Mo to consider channeling some of the money from years without winners to countries with promise – to help facilitate institutional reforms – all in an attempt to make the environment safe for the incumbent and his cronies in case he chooses to step down.