Nearly $5 billion in foreign debt, gone in three years. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s government wiped out that burden after she took office, the BBC reported, which cleared the way for foreign investment and lifted Liberia’s annual budget from $80 million to $516 million by 2011. For a country stripped bare by 14 years of war, it was the clearest sign that the economist in the presidential seat knew her trade.
She was the first woman elected president of an African country. She served 12 years, and she got there by way of prison, exile and two lost races.
A banker and a finance minister
Sirleaf was born in Monrovia in 1938. She studied in the United States, at Madison Business College, the University of Colorado Boulder and Harvard, where she earned a Master of Public Administration at the Kennedy School. Back in Liberia she worked in William Tolbert’s government, first as an assistant finance minister. A “bombshell” speech to the Liberian Chamber of Commerce, accusing corporations of hoarding or sending their profits overseas, drew attention to her. She became Minister of Finance in 1979.
It did not last. Samuel Doe seized power in a coup in April 1980 and had Tolbert killed. Sirleaf took a post under the new rulers, then fled in November 1980 after publicly criticizing them. She went to the World Bank in Washington, and in 1981 to Nairobi as a Citibank vice president.
Prison and exile
She came back for the 1985 elections. In August she was placed under house arrest and soon sentenced to ten years for sedition, after a speech insulting Doe’s government. International calls for her release brought a pardon in September. The election itself was widely condemned as neither free nor fair. She won a Senate seat and refused to take it in protest.
After a failed coup attempt that November, Doe’s forces arrested her again. She was freed in July 1986 and slipped out of the country.
In 1997 she ran for president on the Unity Party ticket and finished second, with just under 10% of the vote to Charles Taylor’s 75%. Accused of treason after the controversy, she went into exile in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She had earlier backed Taylor’s rebellion against Doe, then turned against his handling of the war. Her political toughness won her the name Africa’s Iron Lady.
The 2005 run-off
After the Second Liberian Civil War, she headed the Governance Reform Commission. In the 2005 election she placed second in round one behind George Weah, a former footballer, then won the run-off with 59% of the vote to his 40%. Weah disputed the result. She was declared the winner on 23 November 2005 and inaugurated on 16 January 2006, with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice among the guests.
She won re-election in 2011. Four days before that vote came the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for efforts to bring women into the peacekeeping process. Opposition candidate Winston Tubman called it “undeserved” and “a political interference in our country’s politics.” Sirleaf called the timing a coincidence.
A mixed record
The BBC’s assessment of her tenure was blunt. She declared corruption “public enemy number one” in 2006 and was hit by a flurry of scandals. Civil servants went unpaid, including health officials in Lofa County just as Ebola crossed the border from Guinea; the virus killed nearly 5,000 people in Liberia. She appointed three of her sons to top government posts, which she always defended.
Leymah Gbowee, who shared the Nobel with her, told the BBC that Sirleaf delivered no women’s agenda. Sirleaf signed an executive order on domestic violence in her last week in office. Even so, Gbowee said, “One thing we can brag and boast of, she broke the glass ceiling.”
Days before she was due to leave office in January 2018, Sirleaf was expelled from her own party. Jenneh Sebo, 22, jobless in the Monrovia sun, put the legacy simply: “The best thing she did is the peace she kept for us.”
Sources
- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – Wikipedia
- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: The legacy of Africa's first elected female president
