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First female african president elected in liberia { November 20 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0511200298nov20,1,147130.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hedhttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0511200298nov20,1,147130.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
Liberia verges on a new day
The apparent election of a female `technocrat' might end a ruinous populism, experts say
By Laurie Goering
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published November 20, 2005
JOHANNESBURG -- After a decade of civil war under brutal warlord Charles Taylor, Liberia is a ruined nation.
The capital has no running water, no sewerage system and no public electricity. Unemployment is 85 percent. The national debt is $3.5 billion, 43 times the annual budget. For the past two years, the country has essentially been run by 15,000 United Nations troops sent there to stop the bloodshed.
So when Liberians--most of them under the age of 24--went to the polls recently to elect a new president, they did a remarkable thing: They turned down flashy Liberian-born soccer star George Weah as their next leader and gave their votes to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a 67-year-old grandmother and former World Bank economist.
"When a technocrat wins over a populist, that's a sign people want the basics," said Emira Woods, a Liberian native who is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, a U.S.-based think tank. Johnson-Sirleaf's election, she said, is "definitely a step in the right direction."
Johnson-Sirleaf, a former banker and United Nations Development Program administrator, has yet to be formally declared Liberia's president-elect. Weah has lodged election fraud charges, which are being investigated. But with the final tally showing Johnson-Sirleaf with 59.4 percent of the vote to Weah's 40.6 percent, she almost certainly will become Africa's first elected female president.
Her election "is indicative of [Liberians'] desire to put the war years behind them and begin the difficult task of re-creating the state," said Ezekiel Pajibo, director of the Center for Democratic Empowerment in Monrovia, Liberia's capital. "Without a doubt she sets the conditions for the country to move ahead."
Johnson-Sirleaf, who was Liberia's finance minister in the late 1970s before being swept out in a 1980 military coup by Samuel Doe, has a long resume of confrontation with the dictators and warlords who have run Liberia for most of the last 20 years.
She was beaten while imprisoned more than a year by Doe's regime, said longtime friend John Stremlau, head of the international relations department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 1997, facing death threats, she challenged Taylor for the presidency in national elections, coming in second.
Now, she says, she has "an abiding hope that we can work together to achieve a new, united and productive Liberia in which we can all be proud to live, raise our children and call home."
Rebuilding Liberia, a nation founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, will be anything but easy. The youthful supporters of her rival Weah see Johnson-Sirleaf as a part of the nation's old, discredited and often corrupt elite. Even those willing to give her a chance expect huge changes right away.
New leader's promise
Johnson-Sirleaf has fueled some of those expectations herself, promising to restore electricity to Monrovia within six months, a huge project expected to cost more than twice the country's $80 million annual budget.
"There's a populist, anarchic element that the leadership will have to take into account," warned Carl Patrick Burrowes, a Liberian historian at Howard University. "And unemployed people are looking for a savior, a magic improvement."
The last Liberian government Johnson-Sirleaf worked for, in the 1970s, spent so much time focusing on bureaucratic functions that it failed to notice rising populism in the nation, he said. A decision to remove subsidies on rice, a national staple, led to riots that ultimately helped bring Doe to power.
Johnson-Sirleaf, he said, is "competent, a no-nonsense type of person, not tainted by rumors of corruption, and with personal qualities that make a her a good administrator."
"But it remains to be seen what her vision is for the country," he said. "The United Nations and World Bank are not noted for producing visionaries."
Still, most political analysts--and Liberia's voters--think she's the right woman for the job.
Desperate for peace, stability and economic progress, Liberians "are just tired," said Jerome Verdier, an environmental lawyer in Monrovia. "Now there seems no other option but to change."
Liberian analysts say that to succeed the new president first will have to ensure the country's security by extending the mandate of UN troops while the national army and police are rebuilt. This could help prevent instability in neighboring Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone from creeping across the borders into Liberia. Taylor, now in exile in Nigeria, also remains a potential threat.
Then she will have to move quickly against endemic corruption in Liberia and try to start economic recovery. The latter might be accomplished through a major public works program to repair the nation's destroyed roads and through efforts to build manufacturing jobs in an economy now centered on exporting the country's rich stores of timber, iron ore and rubber, experts said.
Vision for future
"The country is not poor. The country is impoverished," said Pajibo, who hopes to see Liberia start building furniture from its timber, producing condoms for Africa from its rubber, making its own steel and starting tourism and fishing industries.
Liberia in many respects has a long history as a proud and progressive nation. Unlike many places in Africa, women have been allowed to own land since the nation's founding, and Africa's first female university president was a Liberian.
In recent years, woman have made remarkable political progress in other African nations, taking prime minister positions in Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe, the vice presidency of South Africa and nearly half the legislative seats in Rwanda. But if the numbers hold, Liberia will be the first African country to elect a woman as president in nearly a half-century of postcolonial rule.
Liberians now will wait to see whether their new leader has what it takes to best the country's warlords, thugs and thieves.
"The challenges seem almost insurmountable rationally," Burrowes said, "but with will and human creativity things can happen."
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Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
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