Much Ado about a prize in Leadership

Okay there is a lot of activity in the Nigerian blogoshere, if there is anything like that, with respect to some Mo Ibrahim guy endowing a 5 million dollar prize for a best perfoming least theiving Head of State of an African Country. As much as this is a step in the right direction public relations wise for Africa and more importantly for this Mo guy. Afterall I know him now, I never heard of the dude before today. We know that this prize isn't large enough to make a Nigerian Local Goverment Chairman bart an eyelid. Did I hear anyone say, Oh come on now Omodudu, the prize is large enough to sway any Local Government Chairman from dipping his sticky fingers in the National Moi-moi (every passing day makes the cake look less like a National cake). Nope I'd say, by the time the guys multiplies the probability of winning by the 5 million dollars in question, the expected payoff turns out to be too low to make any meaningful impact in our hypothetical leaders decision process.

Lets undertake a simple excercise here.

Question:

How much prize money would be required to persuade a Nigerian State governor to desist from looting the states coffers.

Answer:

All assumtions that support rational decision making are invoked at this point.

Lets assume that the said amount will persuade 50% (18) of the state governors to participate in the competition described above.

We also assume that they are so devoted to the our competition that they put in 100% effort, ie steal no money. Then the expected pay of for every governor is 1/18* (prize money)

To persuade a governor to take this option 1/18*(prize money)>maximum possible loot, that is setting bragging rights and morality to zero (this is not a far fetched assumption given the ethical and moral composition of Nigerian public office holders anyway.)

Its obvious that our prize money will have to be in the billions.

Its now obvious that we can not afford the kind of incentive required to make any public officer change his/her thieving ways. Only dis-incentives will work.

NB: This is an abstraction.