Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: Africa’s first woman president

Days are growing into weeks and months, with 2018 already looking like the year, when significant history and undeniable posterity would meet halfway, highlighting the power of excellent leadership to change Africa for good.
From being the first women to become president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia has now gone to become the first woman to win the prestigious Mo Ibrahim Prize for good governance in Africa.

Call it a valentine’s gift, perhaps you might be right, as former president of Liberia, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson was awarded the 2017 Mo Ibrahim prize for achievement in African Leadership, and for her role in stabilizing the polity.
An economist by training and famously dubbed as the ‘Iron Lady of Africa’, she assumed office in 2006 at the end of a 14-year civil war where an estimated 200,000 Liberians were killed.
Her two terms as president ended in 2017 after which she handed over to football star, George Weah.

Childhood & Early Life

Born on October 29, 1938, in Monrovia, Liberia, to Jahmale Carney Johnson, a lawyer, and his wife, a teacher, Ellen is of mixed indigenous Gola and German heritage.
Her father who was the first indigenous Liberian to sit in the national legislature, sent her to the College of West Africa in Monrovia between 1948 and 1955, when she clocked 17 and got marriedJames Sirleaf. They had four sons together and divorced later on.
In 1961, she went to the United States and earned an associate degree in accounting from Madison Business College, Wisconsin.
From 1969 to 1971, she studied economics and public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and earned a Masters of Public Administration degree. Upon completing her studies, she returned to her native Liberia and became the Assistant Minister of Finance under the government of William Tolbert in 1972 but resigned after a year.

Political Career

After Tolbert’s assassination and execution of most of the cabinet by Samuel K. Doe in 1980, she initially accepted a post in the new government as ‘President of the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment’.

In 1981, she moved to Nairobi to serve as the Vice President of the African Regional Office of Citibank, a post she held for four years. She resigned from Citibank following her involvement in the 1985 general election in Liberia and went to work for Equator Bank, a subsidiary of HSBC.
In 1992, she was appointed the Director of the ‘United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau for Africa’ at the rank of Assistant Administrator and Assistant Secretary General (ASG).

Presidency

In 1997 she resigned from the post to run for the president in the general elections in Liberia.
She ran as the presidential candidate from the United Party against Charles Taylor and was placed second, getting one-fourth of the total votes in the controversial election. As a result, she left the country soon after she was charged with treason and went into exile.
During 12 years of exile in Kenya and the United States, Liberia collapsed into civil war, while Johnson Sirleaf became an influential economist for the World Bank, Citibank, and other international financial institutions. From 1992 to 1997 she was the director of the Regional Bureau for Africa of the United Nations Development Programme.

In 1999 Liberia’s civil war had resumed and after Charles Taylor went into exile in 2003, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf returned to Liberia to chair the Commission on Good Governance, which oversaw preparations for democratic elections.
In 2005 she again ran for president, vowing to end civil strife and corruption, establish unity, and rebuild the country’s devastated infrastructure.

Known as the “Iron Lady,” she placed second in the first round of voting, and on November 8, 2005, she won the runoff election, defeating football (soccer) legend George Weah. Johnson Sirleaf was sworn in as president of Liberia on January 16, 2006.

The plus factor

Sickened and fatigued by war, thousands of Liberian women, through mass action, brought about an end to the conflict in 2003.

These same women took great risks to elect Sirleaf on her promise to sustain peace and make gender equality central to her administration’s agenda.
Some women hid their sons’ voter ID cards to prevent them from voting for Sirleaf’s opponent; others tricked the young men into exchanging their cards for beer; still others managed market stalls while their female owners went to register to vote and watched babies so that mothers could vote on Election Day.
These women, many of whom belong to the Women in Peace Building Network (WIPNET), are identifiable by their white T-shirts with blue WIPNET insignia. They are a powerful, widely respected group for what they have
accomplished and continue to fight for.
When Sirleaf came to power in 2005, the world was electrified. On Inauguration Day in January 2006, proud Liberians, world leaders and dignitaries watched as she took the oath of office.

Sirleaf singled out the women in the peace movement, thanking them for their courage, and committed to supporting their agenda. The Sirleaf administration kept some of its promises but with notable challenges.

With more than 15,000 United Nations peacekeepers in the country and unemployment running at 80 percent, Johnson Sirleaf faced serious challenges. She immediately sought debt amelioration and aid from
the international community.
By late 2010 Liberia’s entire debt had been erased, and Johnson Sirleaf had secured millions of dollars of foreign investment in the country.
In addition, she established a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) in 2006 to probe corruption and heal ethnic tensions.

Efforts toward eradicating corruption — a significant problem that Johnson Sirleaf had pledged to end — included the creation of the Anti-Corruption Commission in 2008.

Despite having previously pledged to serve only one term as president, in 2010 Johnson Sirleaf announced her intent to stand in the October 2011 presidential election, stating that she still had work to do.
A month before the election, however, Johnson Sirleaf’s eligibility was challenged in court by a small opposition group that pointed to a provision of the constitution that stated that all presidential candidates were to have resided in Liberia for 10 years prior to an election, a requirement that Johnson Sirleaf and several other candidates did not meet and one that the government had tried — but failed — to have changed via referendum in August 2011.

Six days before the election the Supreme Court dismissed the challenge, noting that the writers of the 1986 constitution could not have foreseen the years of conflict that forced many Liberians to live outside the country. Additional pre-election controversy was generated when Johnson Sirleaf won the Nobel Peace Prize mere days before the poll. Other candidates complained that the Nobel Committee was interfering with Liberian politics by awarding the prize so close to the election.

Although Johnson Sirleaf’s administration had made efforts to curb corruption, it continued to be a problem during her second term. Complaints of nepotism also hit the administration, with Johnson Sirleaf herself coming under fire in 2012 because some of her children had high-level jobs in government or state-owned enterprises.

The Ebola Years and afterwards

Economic progress continued during Johnson Sirleaf’ssecond term until the country was hit with the devastating Ebola virus disease in 2014. Over the course of the next two years, the disease killed more than 4,800 Liberians, crippled the country’s economy, and erased many of the country’s hard-fought gains of the previous postwar decade.

As the country attempted to recover from Ebola, Johnson Sirleaf, constitutionally limited to two terms as president, prepared to step down after the 2017 presidential election. Her running mate of the previous two elections and current vice president of Liberia, Joseph Boakai, became the
presidential candidate of her political party, the Unity Party (UP).
After the first round of voting, however, she was accused by the UP of having supported another presidential candidate: her previous opponent, George Weah.

Although she vigorously denied the accusations, the charges persisted, and in January 2018 the UP expelled her from the party.
Later that month, on January 22, she stepped down as president of Liberia, handing power to Weah, who had emerged as the winner of the second round of voting. It was the first transfer of power between democratically elected leaders in Liberia since 1944.

ELLEN: The Legacy

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf leaves a mixed legacy behind her because on the one hand she is responsible for helping to sustain peace in Liberia since the end of the civil war in 2003. She’s also taken positive steps to improve the livelihoods and particularly the protection of women in Liberia, such as ensuring that
women could be recruited into the armed forces.

But a slight dent on her image is the fact is that Liberia remains a country that is really underdeveloped. It ranks among the lowest of countries in the Human Development Index around the world.

Infrastructure is limited, and in In a country where the medium age is 18, unemployment is a real concern.

Allegations of corruption raised questions about her ability and whether she could have done more during the period. It’s also important not to forget the Ebola crisis that unfolded in Liberia in 2014, which seriously eroded development gains as well.
But if you are looking at an immediate post-conflict environment, you would agree that it can be difficult and complex to do the work of rebuilding the country, consolidating peace and sustaining a transition towards democracy all at the same time.
In recognition of Johnson Sirleaf’s leadership of Liberia during the challenging period of transition after the country’s devastating years of conflict and for the positive changes that took place in Liberia under her administration, in February 2018 she was awarded the 2017 Ibrahim Prize for
Achievement in African Leadership.

The award provided $5 million, disbursed over 10 years, followed by an annual $200,000 stipend for the rest of Johnson Sirleaf’slife. It also brought the possibility of the foundation awarding $200,000 annually over the course of 10 years to charitable causes supported by Johnson Sirleaf.

Over the years, Africa has grown to become a continent where in the midst of extensive resources and limitless potentials, poor leadership remains the bane of underdevelopment.

The story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf shows that a better continent is possible, and all it takes is good governance to correct the leadership mistakes of the past and the brighten the horizon of hope for the future.

This article originally written by me was first published on Inside Watch Africa Magazine.