Transcript

Zainab Salbi: Well, that was a brilliant film, Mo, because it told us all about the foundation. I want to have a conversation about your own upbringing and the values, more importantly, the values in which you were brought up. You grew up in Sudan, and then in Egypt, and then we’ll talk about the rest. But what are the foundational values that are still impacting your life today?

Mo Ibrahim: Right. I am a Nubian and Nubians are a small community, which straddles Sudan and Egypt around the Nile. It is a very old civilization. It has its own language, etc. There are only maybe 300,000 people, etc. Half of them live in Sudan, half in Egypt, although the half in Egypt is vastly disappearing, but that’s another issue. It is a tight community. We have a very, very long history. We are the original pharaohs, but it’s also a poor community. We don’t have much wealth so we don’t have oil, or gas, or diamonds or anything. We are based around the culture and the Nile. The Nile is the lifeline for us.

And it has its wonderful values of a community. We are a community. You don’t go to sleep if did not have dinner. If a father dies somewhere the children are the responsibility of everybody. And this is something we do without even thinking. It is a matter of honor and people are valued by what you call their honor not by their money or the size of bank accounts. That’s how the community respects. The community also respect women. I recall, both my grandmothers, on both sides, were leaders in their community. Men would come and sit at their feet to discuss issues, problems they have with their wives and I am always amazed about how grown-up men defer to women.

While in the communities around us it is shameful sometimes even to mention a woman’s name, in our community it is normal to relate you to your mother’s name. When I was a kid I went to the village and people did not know me because I did not live in the village and they asked, “Who is this boy?” And they said, “It is Mo Ibrahim.” “So, who is Mo Ibrahim?” They say, “Oh, he is the son of Ida.” My mother’s name is Ida. “Oh, yeah, yeah.” So, it is a different kind of environment there, it is just normal. We have a saying in our own language, which is also disappearing. When people die they wrap them in a shroud to bury them.

The saying goes: The shroud has no pockets.

And this is something very, very important to say, “The shroud has no pockets.” You cannot take your wallet with you. You cannot take your American Express with you. Remember that. And this is something people really mean and that affects you for the rest of your life, this sense of community, we are all born equal, and we need to look after each other. And I think this was a great value actually given and I hope I pass it to my children. I don’t know if I succeed or not. The problem, my children live in Western environment, which is a bit more materialistic but I fight very hard to try to restore it. We will see.

Salbi: Well, your philanthropy shows that you are passing it to the world and knowing

Hadeel I think you are also passing it to your children.

Ibrahim: I hope so.

Salbi: Then you moved. Then you got your doctorates and then you moved to business, in telecommunication business and I would say you made an impact on Africa through your business first.

Ibrahim: It’s true.

Salbi: What are the lessons that you learned from the business journey, in terms of values that you eventually took to philanthropy? What are the lessons?

Ibrahim: Yeah. That is an interesting point. When I did my first business out of frustration—I do not have much time to go through my personal stories—very briefly, I was an academic and I was working and developing propagation, radio propagation models for the mobile industry. That is all well before cellular and this stuff. And then I was asked by British Telecom to come to join them as a technical director to design the first mobile networks in Europe. And it was a good opportunity as engineers to go out and play with a big train set. Engineers are children. They love to play with train sets and it is a wonderful profession; I recommend it. And, so that was my chance to have this wonderful opportunity so we had the first hand portable system in the world. We installed it in London in 1985.

I grew frustrated with the culture in British Telecom, which is another story, and so what you do is: “Okay, I am going to leave. What do I do? I am going to be a consultant.” And very quickly I discovered that I cannot handle all the work; I had to have some people. Anyway, I ended up being a businessman. We started a company called MSI, which ended being the largest independent technology house in Europe. We designed the mobile networks in Europe, in France, in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Spain. We did Moscow. We did Singapore, China. We had 17 subsidiaries worldwide and we specialized in the network design; 10-key design contracts. And I was amazed that when every company was rushing to acquire mobile network licenses everywhere and they were paying a huge amount of money, if you recall the numbers at that time, but nobody was willing to do Africa.

And we said, “Why you guys are not going to do this in Africa?” And the answer was always that, “Oh, it is difficult. Corruption, dictatorships.” Now, the story about Africa is that Africa always had a bad reputation. There is a huge gap between reality and perception because people forget that Africa is 54 countries. You have the good, you have the bad, you have the ugly. You have everybody and the problem is what dominates our news channel is the bad because that is what makes news. If there is a genocide in a country, if there is a famine, you know, if there’s fighting in Somalia, this is the news.

But people going happily to their fields, and getting married, and having children is not in the news. So out of these 54 countries I can make a huge list of countries which you have never heard about. You do not know it ever existed even because it is not in the news. There is nothing happening. So that was a clear issue for me, that gap between perception and reality. Again, as a businessman, you know when there is a gap between perception and reality, there is a huge business opportunity. Of course, because the market does not see reality. The market sees the perception. And, of course being in Africa also I felt a little bit insulted and so I said, “Okay, let’s go and do Africa.” The fantastic lesson we learned in doing Africa was everybody told us, “You are crazy. You’re going to lose your money.”

Our first company was a great success and I sold it in 2000; I think company started with £50,000. We sold it for about 900-something million dollars. And I was very proud that 33% of the shares was in the hand of my employees. You know, I believe in employee shareholders. I mean I want to have partners not employees. So that was something wonderful, and I think we have been very successful because of that. When you make your workers shareholders, it changes the whole chemistry, the whole atmosphere in the business. I don’t need to worry who comes at 9:00 or 8:00, who leaves at five. Nobody leaves. It is their company. It is fun; this is my best advice really. If you want to have fun and make a lot of money, give shares to your workers. It changes the whole thing.

Anyway, so we decided to go out and do that and people were speaking about corruption and so we had a very interesting board at that time. We got the first chief executive of Vodafone was in my board, who was a celebrated UK politician, statesman, who was on my board. I had the director from IFC, the World Bank. We had a big board for a small company starting to operate in Africa, and that was by intention. And, at our first board meeting we said, “Okay, are we going to make a statement about corruption?” They said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. We are going to make a statement to say, ‘not a single dollar.’” So that was our motto, “Not a single dollar in corruption.” Then I asked the board, “How are we going to implement that?”

Every board of every company in the world, any of these big companies around us here, they have something similar. “We do not do corruption. We do not pay this,” and then the board turns a blind eye and let all this nonsense happens down there and they swear, “I do not know.” Just want to make sure you do not go to prison. So, I said, “Okay. How do we execute this? It is nice to make a slogan but how do we do it?” And we came to a conclusion that the best way to do this is not for a board sitting somewhere in Europe or in US to make all these wonderful statements. The board is to support your people on the ground. We said, “Okay. We have these mobile companies, but each mobile company is an entity in each country and we end up having 14 of them in 14 countries. We have all the CEOs running all these businesses. How are we going to support your CEO?” Your CEO running your operation and, I will give you an example; let’s say Uganda.

And then the Director of Intelligence or Director of the Police comes into his home in the evening and say, “Okay, I have an election next month. Are you guys going to support me or not?” This guy is intimidated. How are we going to support him? That was, that is the challenge for business.

Salbi: And for non-profit as well. They face the same challenges on the ground.

Ibrahim: This is the challenge. We made a very interesting simple decision. We solved the problem very easily. We said, “Okay, as a board we will not allow anybody in the company, including myself; and I’m the Chairman and Founder of the company, to sign a check of more than £30,000 without a board approval.” Now that appeared to be very onerous on the business side because it is a big company, it is running and it forced us to produce a tight budget, very clear budget, but also it required the full support of the board. So, I told the board members: “Okay, you have 13 on the board. If you are serious about this, this means for our business not to be hurt if there is any expenditure above £30,000 I have to pass a resolution.

This means within 24 hours I need each one of you to be able to respond, otherwise you cannot run the business.” And it was amazing the wonderful response, response of our 13 businesspeople because somebody s in US, somebody on holidays; and I had all their mobile numbers, their children´s numbers, their wives’ numbers, their girlfriends’ numbers. Anytime if there is a need we explain to the board what his need is and who is going to do this and we get the approval within 24 hours, because we have to have 100% when you pass a board resolution like that. So, it is a commitment and the seriousness of the board, when it says, “I fight corruption”, you put your skin in the game, and that solved the problem. And once you did this everybody in Africa knew we do not pay bribes. There is no need. Nobody came to us asking for anything.

Salbi: I think I finally got it, because you were able to operate a business in Africa without corruption.

Ibrahim: Yes.

Salbi: Thus it sort of informed your philanthropy. It informed your award, which is one of the biggest awards in the world for non-corrupt leaders. Is that the foundation how you bridge between your business and philanthropy?

Ibrahim: All these things comes together. And it brings an understanding of the process of corruption. And when you understand that we as businesspeople are part and parcel of the corruption process, only then we will be able to start to deal with it. There is no point in talking about this to a minister or this guy being corrupted. Let’s talk about ourselves if we are really serious and we can do it as businesspeople. And that is something we need to talk about that is why I go around business schools. I sit on the board of London Business School, and I speak at other business schools. I tell them, “Look, guys. You need to change the way we train our future businesspeople. We have to be ethical in the way we do the business because the world is going really belly up around us.

Salbi: I agree. When did you engage in philanthropy? As you were doing the business? Or when you finished the business journey you said, “I am going to migrate to philanthropy.”

Ibrahim: No, we said it after. From the outset when we formed the second company, Celtel, I told everybody that, “You guys, you know what? Any money I am going to make out of this company I am going to give it back to Africa, because this is an African company. We are making the money in Africa. We pay our taxes in Africa.” We were the largest tax payer in about nine countries in Africa, which is amazing. It is not the oil. It is not the gas. It is not the diamonds or the copper. It is us. Anyway, we said, “Yeah, all the money will have to go. I do not need it. I am comfortable. I made money from my first company. I am comfortable with that.” So that was it, everybody knew that, but I could not do what I do now while I had big business in Africa, obviously, because we were going to have a very firm position vis-à-vis governments, and leaders, and we were going to point the fingers.

And if I run the largest company in that country, the tax payers, it is going to be a problem for the company and for the business. As a businessman, it is difficult to get involved in politics because we are really political organization and so to do that you have to be free. So now I am unemployed. I do not need any jobs from anybody. I do not need a medal. Then I am free to say what I want to say without conflicts.

Salbi: Which is what I love the most about you because you say it as it is. You roll your eyes when it is a, “Uh,” about homosexuality, as if, “that, we need that.” You know, you are gutsy. Even in the award, the Mo Ibrahim Award, it is sort of gutsy, I would say. It is loud. It is fearless. Is that part of your strategy? I have so many questions related to that. First: Does the size matter? The size of the award, the size of the giving, the size of how you do things, does that matter?

Ibrahim: We had a lot of discussion about this with the board and all agonized over that. And we wanted to grab the attention, on one hand. Secondly, we actually have a problem with retiring African leaders. When, if you are an African leader, or if you are a leader in Europe, or US, or wherever, you retire. You have a life after office, okay. You retire with hopefully clean hands and everything, but see how much Obama was offered for his memoirs. Any bank, any fund will be very happy to have Tony Blair. Look where all our previous Prime Ministers in Europe went. They are all in the boards. Maybe rightly. They have experience. They have whatever.

They have life after office. They actually get rich after they leave office, all of them. Now, where our leaders go, if you are clean, where do you go? There is no pension to take care of you. There is nothing. And no bank will take you because who cares about the past president, the previous President of Botswana? Is J.P. Morgan going to offer him a seat on the board? Out of question. So, what happens to those guys? Now, we say if you are really a wonderful person and you finish this job, we want to take you to civil society. We say, “Now, you start your foundation.” One guy said, “Okay, I am about girl education.” So, he has his foundation about girls’ education and he goes around with his foundation, talk, also talks to other African leaders about why girl foundation is important.

Now he is funded by this, so what he gets is just reasonable to live sensibly and not to worry about jobs. They become role models. They go out and speak. Somebody focuses on the issue of AIDS. All our laureates have been working in Madagascar. The guy who did the deal on the peace in Madagascar was one of our laureates. They negotiate in Congo to try to solve the problem. They deal with the issue of Boko Haram and they deal with some violence in Kenya, during the election eight years ago, seven years ago, and the army in Uganda. That is what our laureates do, going around as statesmen, respected statesmen trying to broker peace, try to champion issues, some of which are controversial because not everything in African culture is acceptable.

I mean homosexuality is a problem in Africa and they have this stupid concept that it is alien, that it is something the Western people bring here. And I say, “Guys, just calm down.” And, we have to say these things. So that is why—sorry, it is a long answer to your question.

Salbi: No, no, no. It’s brilliant.

Ibrahim: But we need to get all the good people on board and enable them to go out and make a change, and we need a lot of change not only political, economic, but also in our culture. We need to change the negative aspect of our culture. Why have a President in South Africa that says, “It is okay I have 15 women”? We say, “No, Mr. President. It is not okay.” “Oh, but it is Zulu culture.” But I said, “No, no, no, no, no. This is corrupted because it is not enough to say, ‘Oh, it is… the culture of my tribe. I do it.’ Maybe it is wrong. It is your job as a leader to stand up and correct what are negative aspects in your culture.” So, this is the kind of issues we need to do. It is easier for us to do it because we are Africans so whatever we say or we do they cannot say, “Oh, you are imperialists.” No. I am an African and I come from a tribe older than the Zulu. They cannot say anything so we need to go and tell them, “This and that has to be changed, okay. Do not tell me, ‘It is Africa.’”

Salbi: It is genuine respect of the culture. This is coming out of genuine love and respect for the culture. He is like, “No, you are challenging.”

Now, you have your daughter who heads your philanthropy. Tell me more about that experience. How did you choose your daughter? I mean she was young when you passed it on to her. How did you come to that journey?

Ibrahim: It was not much of passing things on. It is getting your children, getting family involved. It started when I was doing business, especially in my first company because I was very busy. I did not have time to spend with my children because we are running all over the world and we are doing network in Australia, we are doing something in the United States or so I try to use my weekend to spend with my children. Unfortunately, because of our global business as consultants there is somebody always in London in the weekend. I do not know why; either people passing through or coming, and then people call and say, “Oh, Mo, I am going through London. Can we have dinner? Can we have lunch together?” And it is very rude to say no so I always made it a rule to say, “Okay, if you want to have lunch or dinner it is going to be with my family. Take it or leave it because I have not seen those guys, okay.”

And people actually loved this because it is a sign of intimacy or respect to have. So, from there Hosh and Hadeel, my two children, when there we are they will come and sit with us. We will go to somewhere, a restaurant or whatever, and they will be around some serious discussion, whatever it is. And I think that helped to be a part. We do not kick the children out. Again, that is part of our culture. I notice in UK, for example, when people come to visit they go to a different room, and children are kicked out. I always let the children come in. They sit with us, whatever we say we say it in front of them. And it can be about anything, they can participate. That helped bring people into the discussions, that is why both Hosh and Hadeel are involved at some stage but I did never try to put a straightjacket. Hadeel now is working mostly outside our foundation.

She is still in the board but she is doing the Africa Center here, she is doing another new project about arts and society with some German people and guys from MIT, etc. I want her to blossom. I think it is just about letting people grow up and find their way.

Salbi: iBut it is both as having witnessed the journey from afar. It is actually inspiring to see a father endorsing his daughter publicly and she is a brilliant leader herself on her own merit. It is inspiring to have your own endorsement.

Ibrahim: Oh, thy.

Salbi: Yeah. It is really beautiful. I have a million questions but I am going to open it up for the audience, if there is any question. If not, I am happy to continue, but we have one in here.

Audience Member: Authenticity, and care, and wonderful creativity is really inspiring. My question is about the environment, the impact of the environment that companies have in Africa and what are your ideas, your objectives with your foundation regarding the impact of companies in Africa?

Salbi: May I, Mo, can I just jump on that question and add: what is also your advice for outsiders, for foreigners to work in Africa, be it on a sector of environment or because our audience here are from all over the world. What is your advice on Africa as well?

Ibrahim: Well, I think first let us accept that Africa is a normal place. I love to normalize Africa. Somehow, we all have this kind of romantic view. If you ask anybody, “What do you think about Africa? Close your eyes. What do you think about Africa?” Somebody says, “Oh, I think of lions.” Somebody, “I think of giraffes,” or some people say, “Oh, football,” or I don’t know, “refugee camps.” I believe Oxfam and all those really wonderful people that try to help, actually sometimes do unintended damage to Africa. Because I used to cringe every Christmas because the TV screen is full of refugee camps, dying children, and malnutritioned mothers. They are trying to raise funds obviously and they cannot raise funds without showing these kinds of pictures.

I was in London the other day and discussing Africa with someone, “Oh, there is so many sick—” I said, “You guys are crazy.” We, we have the best athletes in the world, okay. Who wins a marathon everywhere, soccer, football? There is no football in Europe without African players. We run faster than anybody. We jump higher than anybody. We are really healthy people, so do not let Oxfam and those guys fool you. Of course, we have tragedies in one respect, but, again, remember 54 countries so do not throw a blanket statement over Africa by what happened in Somalia or in South Sudan.

So, again, investing in Africa—after we finished we said, “Okay, any investment we make we are going to just invest in Africa,” and we are only investing in Africa. We have Celtel Capital which is a fund invested in Africa. And I tell the guys who are running the fund, they are all African people, and I say, “Look guys, do not come back to me. You go and do what you want to do. One thing: you have to do ethical investment. By ‘ethical investment’ I am saying that you have to do charity; business is business. It is not about charity. You have to do right but you do not bear bribes. You do not invest in a company owned by the bribed minister or the MPs. Depoliticize your investments. We do not want to be linked to any of these powers that be or whatever. So that is all what you need to do. Just invest and do your due diligence.”

I was amazed about a number of people who tried to come to invest in Africa and some are guided by goodwill and they fail to do their homework. And then they come to me and say, “Oh, we invested in these guys and but our partner is very bad.” I say, “Excuse me, did you do your due diligence?” Same thing if you invest in France, in Germany, in somewhere and choose a bad partner or choose a thief as your partner—you have got yourself to blame. So, treat Africa as a normal country. Trust us Africans as normal people. We are just like you guys. We have to be a bit darker. Fair enough. We got maybe too much sun. It is fine. But let’s normalize the situation and do the work when it is due. Returns on investment in Africa historically have been higher than any other place in the world not because Africa is fantastic.

Again, it is a normal low of money. The lack of capital meant that capital become more valuable. You get more return for your capital because there is lack of capital in Africa because big banks, big investors, the big hedge funds don’t know much about Africa, but you don’t do much there. It is the lack of investment so it is fine. I am happy as an investor. As an African I am sad. I am happy to have less competition because you guys are investing in, on your whatever you have here, Apple, or Microsoft, or General Motors or whatever, and I am happy to invest in Africa so it is okay. But as African I am sad because I really think investments create jobs, create prosperity especially ethical investments. I think it is important.

Salbi: What I am hearing from you is integrate all the values together—the business value, the philanthropic value, the personal values, integrate them, in your actions.

Ibrahim: It can be a whole. Yeah.

Salbi: Yes. Any other questions?

Audience Member: Hi, Mo. Thank you for sharing. It is really inspiring. A quick question. You have an app website that tracks corruptions and governance. Have you thought about sharing that with some Asian countries because I think a lot of them actually need that?

Salbi: Have you thought about sharing your Mo Ibrahim Index on corruption?

Audience Member: Your app or your website.

Salbi: Your website with Asian countries.

Ibrahim: My, our site is open. I think you can…

Audience Member: No, collaboration. I mean like help them to track some of the Asian countries.

Ibrahim: To do it for Asia, you mean?

Audience Member: Yes.

Ibrahim: I think that is a little bit not right because in Asia you have more entrepreneurs, more billionaires, more philanthropists than we have in Africa. And you have more people than you have in Africa. It is your job to do your continent. It is not for me, an African, to come and do your continent. You guys are 3 billion people. Why none of you is standing up and saying, “I am going to measure progress in my continent”? You go for an African to say, “Oh, please come and do this for us.” It is not right.

Audience Member: That is fair.

Salbi: We have three questions. Can we take all three of them at the same time or is that too much?

Ibrahim: Yeah. Sure.

Salbi: Muhammad, here.

Audience Member: Hi. I have two quick questions for you. One is: You have spoken very highly of what it is that makes you get out of bed every morning and what it is that as a global leader keeps you from sleeping at night? And the second question I have is: Would you attribute your success to being smart, or being lucky, or both?

Ibrahim: Sorry. What’s the second question?

Salbi: What do you attribute your success to being smart, or lucky, or both?

Ibrahim: I think both. That is easy because you always need luck in whatever you do. There is no crystal ball you can see what. You do your best and things will happen. As far as what keeps me sleepless at night, I really worry about where are we are going as a world, actually. I see a lot of dissatisfaction. I hear a lot of division. I see collapse of old establishment parties, rise of populist movements. I think you are aware of what is happening in Europe recently, and we had very divisive elections. The two dominant parties in France disappeared. Before that there was Italy, there was a question mark over what was going to happen in Italy. You have Brexit. There is a lot of issues globally happening and suddenly I see this, I think, unfair backlash against globalists as if all the problems are because of globalism.

I believe in data and we are trying to have our discussion in Africa based on data and facts. What is happening now, the discourse around us is no longer based on data or on facts. It is just like a TV show, to be honest. I mean when I watch what is going on, there is snippets, slogans thrown at people, total disregard of numbers or facts. You invented a new term, “alternate facts” or “alternate reality.” We never heard about that before. This is the most technologically advanced society in the world and you tell us about alternative facts. What is the alternative facts, guys? You know, are we bringing our children based on something? No longer we are having a discussion based on reality.

The fact is our fortunes have improved a lot because GDP increased a lot before because of globalization. You would not have had Apple. You would never have had Microsoft. You would never have had Amazon without globalization. This would have stayed as US companies. You need to remember that because that means globalization. All these Apple phones are made in China. Nobody would have bought an Apple phone in Africa or in Asia without globalization. You have to understand how many jobs are being created in this country before the globalization. But globalization means also two-way street. And I found it so amazing. I mean if you look at Britain, where I live actually, it is so amazing. A country that will soon be anti-global. Britain was one of the healthiest global countries.

But they forgot that it was globalization under the Empire rule. Britain ruled most of this world 200 years ago. My country, Sudan, was told, “You do not do anything. You produce cotton. Egypt, you produce cotton because I need cotton in my factories.” Yes. All these guys were manually weaving their clothes in India. Millions of jobs disappeared over night because of textile factories in US and UK. Was that not globalization? But it was fine because it was globalization in our own terms. Now if we have more open globalization, two-way, we start to complain. Excuse me. You are happy to win and happy to lose. It is win and lose at the same time. For each steel job or coal job that died in this country there is ten other jobs created in the green technology, and that is thanks for globalization.

But we never count our gains. We only count our losses. And we stand up and say, “Oh, I lost 50,000 jobs of mining or whatever.” Excuse me. You get 10 million jobs over there but nobody is talking about that. This divorce of reality is very dangerous because it leads us to make stupid decisions. We are shooting ourselves in the foot. This is the kind of stupidity, what keeps me awake at night. Where are we going to go?

Salbi: There are so many questions but I think we are running out of time so I am going to take the last question from our colleague from Synergos in Ethiopia.

Audience Member: Thank you, sir. I am really proud to be an African, I mean for knowing you and for whatever you said, sir. I think that I understand that you hold a unique position now in our continent and I am thinking if there is a possibility to play the sort of bridging leadership role bringing Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt around the Nile so that they can all benefit from the gift of God.

Ibrahim: Okay, there are things which, by their nature, have to be quiet. I spoke to a leader and I told him there is a huge misunderstanding. Ethiopia wants to do the dam because you want power, not agriculture, because the land around them is not designed for agriculture anyway. God did not design it for agriculture. Egypt needs agriculture and needs the water, and there is no problem as long as the dam was built in a way. It is a question of how to build up the water reserve behind it, and it will take maybe five, six years to build that. And that can be built during the time when you have too much rain so it does not affect the other countries. It could be sorted out.

Unfortunately, everybody is taking some, apparently nationalistic, but I think misinformed position. And we did not help Egypt at that time; Hosni Mubarak had stopped going to Addis for the meetings. Hosni Mubarak was the leader of Egypt for many years. After that attempted assassination in 1991 or ’92, which had nothing to do with it. Anyway, but he stopped going there. And Egypt has stopped sending a delegation to the African Union so it is out. And remember after the revolution in Egypt I spoke to the Foreign Minister in Egypt, at that time Nabil, and I brokered a meeting to start to really have a proper discussion.

And they are happy. I said to the board, they are American who were raised in Cairo, and I said, “Look. I can invite you to come to speak public in a lecture room about the issues.” And, because he would not speak with the government because as it has happened, during Mubarak the guys who were responsible for the African policy were not the Foreign Minister, not the Prime Minister. It is the security people.

And, of course, their Prime Minister says, “I am a Prime Minister. I am not going to talk to the Head of Intelligence of another country.” But the Prime Minister has no power to speak to me about this. It is dysfunctional, unfortunately. Anyway, we tried to broker this meeting. It went very well. Unfortunately, then Morsi came to power and they had this public meeting broadcast in television. He did not tell the people about the meeting. He invited tourists, party heads, and policymakers, and military guys to a discussion about the Nile. At that time, we were trying to explain what was happening so the guys could talk to each other. This meeting was live on Egyptian TV. The President, Mohamed Morsi, did not tell all those people that, “This is live,” so imagine the discussion goes in that meeting to say, “Oh, the way we deal with this problem is to arm the opposition, and we will get out of the regime.”

Yes, you heard that. Somebody says, “No. The best thing is just to go and bomb the dam. We will bomb the hell out of it.” Then somebody asks, and this is Egyptian leadership talking on TV about how they undermine the regime, so all the work we were trying to do, to bring people together to talk is just gone. What we do if I have stupid leadership like this? We try to help but only when people are willing to discuss and listen. To answer, I am happy to come and speak and give a lecture. I am happy to do this. Can you pass this? I pass the message. I spoke to him, but at the end there is a problem with Egyptian leadership.

Salbi: Unfortunately, we have to wrap.

Ibrahim: Thank you.

Salbi: Personally I always enjoy hearing you. And if I am to summarize all what I have heard from you is to go back to the values that you grew with actually in Sudan, which is help each other, it does not matter how much you have or you do not have, no pockets in the shroud, and share. And you are doing that. What I love, what I hear from you also is that you really have a holistic approach whether it is family, whether it is business, whether it is philanthropy and the freedom and the fearlessness in saying it as it is, which is what we need in the world, and a bridging leader that you are.

Ibrahim: Thank you very much.