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The purpose of this contribution is twofold. First, a critical assessment of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) is carried out. Subsequently, a detailed methodology is provided to enable a Benefit-of-the-Doubt (BoD) analysis of the IIAG. These two major parts are preceded by background information about Africa, governance and composite indicators in general, and the IIAG in particular. As for the assessment of the IIAG, the results are ambiguous: while the IIAG is found to be fairly well conceived, it is also partially obscured due to the inherent normative nature of governance. There is still no consensus about what governance is, what it does, how it is defined and how it is measured and so on. However, ambiguity should not be perceived as a insurmountable constraint in se, as long as objectivity is pursued within a theoretical framework and confirmed by data. As a result of the aforementioned features, national-performance governance indexes invoked additional criticism on top of the common criticisms on composite indicators. The BoD-approach to the IIAG can be regarded as a reconciling method when there is no consensus on the “relative worth” of certain indicators, sub-categories and categories when combined into a single metric. The multiple-layer Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model employed here, allows to derive the weights endogenously (as opposed to paternalistic weighting), and can also be applied for aggregation purposes. A country is assigned its own optimal importance weights for the indicators, sub-categories or categories, to maximize its overall governance score, benchmarked against all 54 other African countries. One could interpret these optimal importance weights as a reflection of implicitly revealed policy priorities. This seems to be additionally substantiated in the current context, as some advocate for “good enough governance” (i.e. selecting a few imperatives from a long list etc.) and country-specific priorities vis à vis the unmanageable “good governance” agenda. In short, at least reflecting these country-specific characteristics and ambiguities when measuring governance using the BoD-approach, could be very instrumental in overcoming certain issues. Moreover, it allows to combat some methodological concerns, inherent to composite indicators. A variety of weight restrictions and aggregation methods were employed. The majority of our models correlated quite well to even excellently with the 2018 IIAG rankings and scores. This might indicate the robustness of the IIAG, and perhaps more importantly, the BoD-approach makes it harder for countries to dispute the weighting and aggregation schemes employed, as more data-driven flexibility is offered.