Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

by Scully, Pamela;

  In the years that followed in the lead-up to the 2005 election, many groups worked to ensure a democratic process that would put to rest the disastrous election of 1997. Building on alliances and agreements made in Accra, women tried to be involved in all aspects of peacebuilding in Liberia. This was easier said than done. UNIFEM and UNICEF worked with the women of WIPNET and other groups to translate the peace agreement into accessible language as well as to start various education initiatives. But as Gbowee recounts, the more formal processes involving the UN Mission to Liberia (UNMIL), such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR), remained focused on men and did not include women in decision-making capacities.5

  But times were a-changing. Sirleaf resigned from the commission in order to run for the presidency, her second bid, having run in 1997. In the elections of 2005, Sirleaf emerged as a front-runner in a field of some initial twenty-two candidates. Sirleaf’s success was due in part to her name recognition, which came from her long history in Liberian politics both inside and outside of the country. Sirleaf’s success was also due to use of American-style electioneering techniques. She hired Willis Knuckles, one of her possible rivals, as her campaign manager. She raised money in the United States, where wealthier Liberians had moved during the war, through fund-raising events. And in Liberia, she used the rents from properties she owned (she was after all a successful businesswoman) to finance her campaign. Perhaps most important, as she describes in her autobiography, she hired Larry Gibson, a professor of law at the University of Maryland in the United States, who had been in the Carter administration, and had run Bill Clinton’s campaign in Maryland in 1992. After traveling around Liberia, he ascertained that Sirleaf had a chance to win the election.6

  Certainly, the country remained somewhat divided about Sirleaf’s candidacy, reflecting long reservations about her early association with Taylor. But given the importance of women in forcing peace in Liberia, they were not going to let pass an opportunity to have an accomplished woman in the president’s mansion. Sirleaf was thus fortunate to be able to count on the support of women in the vibrant peacebuilding community. They helped mobilize her campaign and took the word of the importance of voting far beyond Monrovia. Gbowee and other influential women such as Cerue Garlo, also of WIPNET, organized a campaign through UNMIL to register women to vote. Gbowee recalls that when they started the campaign some 15 percent of registered voters were women; by the end it was 51 percent. It was the high number of registered voters, and the enthusiasm of voters for the possibility of a female president that led Gibson to conclude that Sirleaf had a chance.

  As Sirleaf recounts, Gibson helped structure a wise and disciplined campaign. A first principle was to avoid antagonizing opponents, whose support might well be needed later, as they indeed were in the runoff election. As Sirleaf writes in her autobiography, Gibson also understood the power of images: he had Sirleaf photographed in Western and Liberian dress, which could be used in different contexts. A-line skirts and jackets telegraphed Sirleaf’s financial background and comfort dealing with international actors. Her long skirts and patterned blouses conveyed links to Liberia’s indigenous communities. Also Sirleaf tended to appear without the traditional head wrap. In a country with high illiteracy it was important to develop symbols to telegraph larger meanings, including one’s key approach to politics: Gibson decided that going without the head wrap signaled modernity, competency, and education, and would differentiate Sirleaf from other women candidates.7

  Sirleaf’s campaign also built on her expertise in communications and networking across boundaries. Although not a grassroots organizer herself, Sirleaf understood the importance of community mobilizing and the significance of acts, especially in a country where so many were illiterate. In the course of her campaign in 2005, she traveled to the fifteen counties of Liberia, thus making sure many people saw her. She in return saw how people lived and the ravages of the war; she heard firsthand of people’s pain. What Sirleaf witnessed in the rural areas was very different from the life she had been living at the heights of international finance. By going out to the bush beyond Monrovia, her campaign demonstrated a new commitment to a unified Liberia. In the past, election campaigns had centered primarily on Monrovia. In a country historically divided between countryside and Monrovia, between indigenous and Americo-Liberian, between the poor and the elite, Sirleaf enacted a different vision for Liberia.

  Running for president for the Unity Party, Sirleaf used all the tools at her disposal. She honed a message that focused on maternal images of care, her expertise as a financial manager and her education, her role as a longtime opposition figure, and her roots in both Americo-Liberian culture and indigenous Liberian society. Sirleaf turned the fact that she is a woman from a possible liability into a strength, aided much by the esteem in which Liberians now held the women who had done so much to urge peace. Sirleaf invoked ideas of the special gifts of women in restoring harmony and managing well. This resonated well in Liberia, which reeled from the posttraumatic stress of the war and which understands mothering as a central tenet of womanhood.

  In the end, the election was really a two-person race. The leading contenders were George Weah, thirty-eight, a world-famous former soccer star, the only African to be voted FIFA international Footballer of the Year (in 1995), and Sirleaf, the consummate policy wonk. Weah was hugely popular in Liberia and probably the most famous Liberian outside the country at the time. He was initially expected to win the election. A New York Times report in August 2005 indicates the kind of enthusiasm generated by his candidacy: “Weah’s soccer exploits, and his charitable work off the field, have made him a hero. . . . The day he announced he would run in the election . . . thousands of his fans danced in the streets of Monrovia. When Weah returned to Liberia this spring . . . his arrival shut down the capital for the day. As traffic snarled, businessmen shuttered their shops, and screaming students lined the road in from the airport. ‘Weah in town,’ they chanted. ‘Politicians worry!’”8

  Weah did win the first round of the elections, with Sirleaf trailing second. Voter turnout was high. Of the 1.35 million registered voters, 75 percent voted. As the United Nations stated, “The huge voter turnout was a rousing testimony to the people’s desire for peace and an end to the cycle of violence and instability.”9 What Sirleaf and her team counted on was that in the end, Liberia would choose responsibility and education over star power. Weah had the latter in spades. He appealed to the youth. But Sirleaf had political and economic gravitas that included an MA from Harvard and years of working and networking in the world of politics and international development and finance. And she was a woman in a country where male leaders had proven irresponsible and where citizens saw that their female peers had helped bring peace. It was indeed now Sirleaf’s time.

  The runoff election was held on November 8, 2005. The women’s vote really counted: more than half the registered voters in Liberia were women, thanks to the efforts of WIPNET and other groups who went all out to mobilize the female vote. Women were also a notable presence at campaign rallies and in general mobilizing. Through the streets of Monrovia they shouted the slogan and held signs saying, “Sirleaf—she’s our man.” This slogan captured both Sirleaf’s unique presence in Liberian presidential politics, and indeed on the African continent, and also signified that she would be a strong ruler, just like a man. Sirleaf had enjoyed the moniker Iron Lady (a gesture to Margaret Thatcher’s unique place in British politics) since her bid to oust Taylor in the 1997 election. An Iron Lady was what Liberia voted for.10 Sirleaf won the runoff with some 60 percent of the vote. Weah submitted a complaint to the Supreme Court, but the election was ruled fair, albeit with some minor irregularities.

  On November 23, 2005, Sirleaf was declared winner of the election. The world beyond Liberia that noticed, was thrilled. Politicians and leaders in the United States, who had found themselves uncomfortably on the wrong side of history in supporting Charles Taylor’s win in 1997,
were effusive in their praise. The US House of Representatives congratulated Sirleaf on her presidential victory. In their statement they noted her many accomplishments; they said that with “her connections and legitimacy in the world of global finance and capital, [Ms. Sirleaf] stands a better chance of leading Liberia to economic recovery and international demarginalization.”11 It was more or less exactly on those principles, with a dose of feminism, that the new President Sirleaf began to organize her presidency. She was the first elected female president on the entire African continent. Just by being elected, Sirleaf made history. Now, she had to find a way to make her term as president also rewrite history in a good way.

  Daily Talk newsstand in Monrovia, reporting the policies of the incoming president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in December 2005. Photo by Chris Guillebeau.

  The challenges Sirleaf faced were huge. Governor Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island recalled in an interview that when he landed in Liberia during the election, his driver described the country, only two years out of war, as “this is where Mad Max meets the postapocalypse.”12 War-ravaged boys and young men, high on heroin and drunk with terror and bravado still roamed the streets. People tried to recover from histories of rape and abuse often far from their villages, which they had fled either in terror or shame, or both. The infrastructure of the country, never great to begin with, was devastated. Indeed, it hardly existed beyond the confines of Monrovia. In the city, which had had electricity in some neighborhoods, people had stolen the wires to sell. People lived on top of crumbling piles of bricks, the detritus of mortar shells and bullets all around. Old mansions, once glamorous, now were covered with grime, full of people with nowhere else to go. A whole generation had not gone to school, while children born at the beginning of the millennium would be able to go if only there were schools to go to. Liberia was an aching wound. After a shocking civil war, one could describe Liberia as a country with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  It would take a miracle to make things better, and for a while it seemed a miracle had come in the form of Sirleaf. However, she is after all only human. Perhaps it would take more than drive and a particular kind of expertise to heal a country so depressed and mutilated by its histories of inequality and brutality.

  5

  President Sirleaf

  On January 16, 2006, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took the oath of office, thus becoming the twenty-third president of Liberia. People thronged the streets of Liberia in celebration. Representatives of countries from around the world attended the inauguration. These included Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, as well as leaders such as Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa. Sirleaf gave a rousing speech, talking of the need for economic development, an end to corruption, and the need for good governance, reconciliation, and responsibility. She particularly noted the contributions of women to ending the civil war. And she pledged, right then, to “give Liberian women prominence in all affairs of our country. My Administration shall empower Liberian women in all areas of our national life.”1

  President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf waves to the audience at her inauguration in Monrovia, January 16, 2006. White House photo by Shealah Craighead.

  Liberia and Sirleaf faced overwhelming challenges. In 2006, Liberia had 3.4 million people. With a per capita income of just over $100, Liberia was one of the world’s poorest nations. The country had virtually no income apart from that flowing from the concessions to foreign companies, including Firestone. But those concessions also drained Liberia of the income that could be generated if the country managed its own vast natural resources rather than outsourcing the labor, and thus most of the profits. And how was Sirleaf to get the country on the move, with such a high illiteracy rate, some 80 percent, given the war and earlier discrimination? How to knit together a country with some sixteen indigenous languages, a common history only of war and exploitation, and now with hundreds of thousands of people needing sustenance and comfort who had been forced from their homes during the war. With people’s life expectancy only forty-seven years, there was no time to waste. And how to return faith in the very idea of government in a country in which the government had mostly been about plundering the interior for taxes and rubber while creating a settler haven in Monrovia? What a legacy of war. As Sirleaf said in her address to the joint session of the US Congress after she became president:

  Our children are dying of curable diseases—tuberculosis, dysentery, measles, malaria. Schools lack books, equipment, teachers and buildings. The telecommunications age have passed us by.

  We have a $3.5 billion external debt, lent in large measures to some of my predecessors, who were known to be irresponsible, unaccountable, unrepresentative and corrupt. The reality that we have lost our international creditworthiness bars us from further loans, although now we would use them wisely.

  Our abundant natural resources have been diverted by criminal conspiracies for private gain. International sanctions imposed for the best of reasons still prevent us from exporting our raw materials. Roads and bridges have disappeared or been bombed or washed away. We know that trouble once again could breed outside our borders. The physical and spiritual scars of war are deep indeed.2

  One of Sirleaf’s first tasks was to try to get the government up and running in a way that aligned with her vision of good, responsible governance. Sirleaf brought much talent and insight to the task of rebuilding a postconflict country. She recognized the importance of including former opponents in this huge mission of rebuilding Liberia. Although George Weah declined her offer of a government position, other leaders did come on board. But, as she describes in her autobiography, the challenges were huge. Some of the people she would like to have included in government did not have the qualifications she thought essential. Ministers had to work in offices that had been stripped of furniture, with no electricity, no bathrooms, no way of actually working. In addition, as Sirleaf lamented: “One of the most difficult challenges—one of the toughest things in Liberian culture in general—is simply creating the capacity to get things done. . . . This is one of our greatest challenges: developing the capacity of our own people to do all the jobs a functioning democracy requires.”3

  Liberia clearly was going to need outside help both in terms of expertise to get public institutions up and running and to rebuild the infrastructure. The United Nations (UN) was the key partner. The United Nations continued its work through the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and sixteen other programs, agencies, and the World Bank. UNMIL worked hard to restore Liberia from the earliest days of peace through Sirleaf’s presidency. By June 2007 some 314,000 internally displaced people had been returned home through the work of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and others.4 By 2007, at the close of the voluntary repatriation program, UNMIL had helped 105,000 refugees return to Liberia.5 In 2013, UNMIL was still providing stability, security, and expertise in policing, retraining of military units, and running of a government, with the force reduced to some 7,500 from the original 15,000 in 2003. From 2004 to 2007, the UN Police, UNPOL, trained and deployed 3,500 Liberia National Police (LNP) officers; most were stationed in Monrovia, but by the end of 2007 UNPOL had deployed 1,200 LNP officers to the countryside.6 In addition, UNMIL helped train the army. UNMIL also included a senior gender adviser with staff support, to help mainstream gender equity into the new government and develop relations with civil society. As a sign of the new UN commitment to gender equality, women also served as peacekeepers, with women from Nigeria coming first in 2003. Since 2007, women peacekeepers from India have guarded the presidential mansion. UNMIL also helped build schools across Liberia.

  In addition Sirleaf turned to the many Liberians who had moved overseas during the civil war. These included the elites who could afford to go in the first wave of emigration in the early 1990s, as well as those who fled any way they could as Taylor unleashed his tyranny later in that decade. Liberians in Ghana, Atlanta, Minnesota, New York, and London returned home with enthusiasm. People returned fr
om middle-class lives abroad and from refugee camps in neighboring countries. They brought with them different skills, connections, and levels of financial investments, but all brought acumen. They could help rebuild Liberia. Dr. Elizabeth Davis-Russell, formerly provost at SUNY Cortland, came home to lead Tubman University in Harper, in the far south county of Maryland. Yar Donlah Gonway-Gono returned with a PhD to start a community college in her home county, Nimba. Two years after Sirleaf’s inauguration, the changes the Diaspora was making to the country and especially to Monrovia were clear. In Congo town, the old suburb of the elites, people built big houses that dwarfed their poorer neighbors. People from the Diaspora eagerly set up restaurants, filling stations, and businesses, in the hope that Liberia would rise again as a tourist destination for the African American community, as it had been in the 1970s. People also joined the government and headed educational institutions. But other people in the Diaspora remained afraid of returning to Liberia, not entirely convinced that the war was in the past. Charles Taylor had contributed to great violence across the region, destabilizing Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. People feared that hostilities could easily reopen. And stringent citizenship rules that prevent Liberians from holding dual passports and which allow only Liberian nationals to own property continued to cause resentment and unease.

  Sirleaf turned to her wide network created over the thirty-five years of working in international finance and local politics. She relied on personal ties and on the optimism the world felt that with her at the helm, Liberia would flourish. As she said in an interview in 2013, “I bring to the international development debate many years of experience in the private sector and the public sector, working internationally and at home. . . . I’m able to represent Liberia effectively; I’m able to speak convincingly.”7 Sirleaf spoke in the language of international capital and development that the people with funding could understand. As a result, foreign aid in all its dimensions helped pull Liberia from the pit created by war and earlier histories. The United States became a key government partner. In the two years after the peace accord, the United States gave some $880 million to Liberia, including more than $520 million to UNMIL. The United States also gave $90 million to help refugees and internally displaced persons. In the first year of Sirleaf’s term, the United States committed itself to $270 million.