Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Inaugurated as the president of the African nation of Liberia in January of 2006, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (born 1938) was the first woman elected as the head of state in any African country.

Sirleaf faced enormous challenges upon taking office. Liberia had been torn by almost two decades of political instability and outright civil war that had killed nearly 10 percent of its citizens. The rest were mired in poverty, with little access to education, electric power, or basic sanitation. However, she enjoyed grassroots confidence to a degree unusual for a contemporary African leader. Liberians called her “Ma,” the “Iron Lady,” or simply Ellen. In her first years in office she devoted much of her time to trying to attract international investment and to find ways out of the ruinous levels of foreign debt Liberia had accumulated over its years of trouble.

Of Indigenous Liberian Background

Sirleaf was born Ellen Johnson on October 29, 1938, in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. Her full name has sometimes been given in the hyphenated form of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, but her biography on the Web site of the Liberian Embassy in the United States omits the hyphen. Despite her American surname and cosmopolitan image, she was not descended from the African-American slaves who founded the Liberian nation in the nineteenth century and gradually assumed the status of a hereditary elite. Her father was a member of the Gola ethnic group and the son of a village chieftain who had been close to Liberian president Hilary Richard Wright Johnson (1837-1901). As a result of that relationship, Sirleaf's father was brought to the capital of Monrovia, given the name of Johnson, and allowed to obtain an education as a lawyer. He eventually became the first indigenous Liberian (i.e., not one of African-American descent) member of the country's national legislature. Sirleaf's mother was of mixed background; her father was a German trader who had to leave Liberia when the country entered World War I on the American side, and her mother was a market trader who was adopted by a member of the Liberian elite after her husband fled.

“I am glad that neither my father nor my mother forgot their roots, and so we spent a lot of time with my two illiterate grandmothers, Jenneh and Juah,” Sirleaf recalled to members of the All Liberian National Conference in Maryland in 2005, as quoted on the Liberia Past and Present Web site. “We also spent all of [our] vacation time in Julejuah, my father's ancestral village, where I learned most of all that there was to know about village life including the long walks from village to village, swimming and pulling canoe in the Kpo River, fishing with twine made from the palm tree, [and] bird hunting.” Sirleaf herself was given the best education her country had available, studying accounting and economics at the College of West Africa in Monrovia.

Marrying James Sirleaf at age 17, she found time to raise four sons in the midst of an impressive educational career; the marriage later ended in divorce. Coming to the United States in the early 1960s, she earned three college degrees. She financed her own education at Madison Business College in Wisconsin, earning an accounting degree there in 1964 after stints as a waitress and drugstore employee in Madison. She earned a second bachelor's degree, in economics, at the University of Colorado in the 1960s, and from 1969 to 1971 she was a student in the graduate program at Harvard University, earning a master's degree in public administration in 1971. She returned home to a post in the Liberian government of President William Tolbert, and she was often sent abroad to cultivate international investment. In 1979 she was elevated to the post of minister of finance, becoming the first woman to hold that office in Liberia.

That began a long period during which Sirleaf attempted to bring professional procedures to Liberia's government against a backdrop of increasing ethnic strife and conflict between the traditional American-descended elites and the country's indigenous patchwork of ethnic groups, which often came into conflict among themselves. She took the side of demonstrators who opposed increases in the government-controlled price of rice, attempted to put in place procedures to curb corruption in government spending, and worked to lessen Liberia's dependence on its longtime but heavily cyclical export staple of iron ore in favor of more reliable foodstuffs such as palm oil and coffee.

Resigned Bank Presidency

Liberia's era of open conflict began with a 1980 military coup that deposed Tolbert (who was executed by firing squad) and installed Liberian army sergeant Samuel K. Doe in power. Doe appointed Sirleaf as director of the Liberian National Bank, but the two soon clashed over the new government's rampant civil rights violations. Sirleaf evaded her mentor's fate by leaving the country and settling in Nairobi, Kenya, where she was hired as the director of the Kenyan division of Citibank. When Doe named himself president in 1984 and putatively allowed the establishment of independent political parties, Sirleaf ran for president in October of 1985 as the candidate of the Liberian Action Party. Doe proclaimed himself the winner of the election, although independent observers proclaimed that Sirleaf would have won had there not been fraudulent practices during the election proceedings.

With that, Sirleaf's existence in her homeland took a sharp turn for the worse. An unsuccessful coup attempt against Doe at the end of 1985 led the dictator to take revenge against his political opponents. Despite her position as an elected Liberian senator, Sirleaf was arrested, jailed, sentenced to ten years in prison, and subjected to psychological torture; soldiers threatened to bury her alive on a beach or to burn off all her hair. After her release in 1986, Sirleaf returned to the United States, and began cultivating support among Liberian exile groups. In the late 1980s she held the post of president at the Equator Bank in Washington, D.C. and at Citibank's African regional office in Nairobi.

When a group of rebel military officers and government officials led by Charles Taylor launched an effort to remove Doe late in 1989, Sirleaf seemed to have a window of opportunity. She supported Taylor, while forces loyal to a third leader, Prince Johnson, captured and executed Doe, and Taylor invited her to join an interim government. The plan soon fell apart, however, as ethnic rivalries flared and Taylor began to wield dictatorial control hardly distinguishable from what the country had experienced under Doe. Sirleaf took a position as assistant administrator at the United Nations Regional Development Program for Africa in 1992, soon becoming the program's director.

Meanwhile, Liberia's situation had devolved into fullscale and ongoing civil war. The real power resided with Taylor, but a group of figurehead leaders was named (none was elected, but one, Ruth Sando Perry, was Africa's first female government leader). When peacekeepers from neighboring countries brought about a pause in ethnic clashes in 1996, free elections were held. Sirleaf quit her UN post and returned to Liberia to run against Taylor. She finished second in a field of 14 candidates, but won only 10 percent of the vote to Taylor's 75 percent.

Criticized U.S. Double Standard

Sirleaf once again faced treason charges in the wake of that election, and again she went into exile. Taylor, however, overplayed his hand by intervening in another civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone in 1999, backing a particularly brutal faction and stirring condemnation both at home and abroad. Sirleaf was a visible face in Washington, criticizing U.S. president Bill Clinton for not committing American forces to end the atrocities in Sierra Leone, even though a European civil war of similar scope in the former Yugoslavia had resulted in American intervention. In 2002 Sirleaf returned to Liberia and was named head of the Unity Party. Taylor responded by banning all political rallies.

In 2003 Liberia's national nightmare ended as Taylor, under UN indictment for war crimes, relinquished power to an interim government led by his subordinate Moses Blah, and went into exile in Nigeria. About 100,000 combatant forces were disarmed, 11 percent of them children who had often been kidnapped and pressed into service by guerrilla forces. The country lost 90 percent of its gross national product and was essentially in ruins, with unemployment running at a staggering 80 percent. Sirleaf was under consideration as interim president, but instead accepted the post of head of the country's Governance Reform Commission. She served in that role from 2003 to 2005 and then announced her candidacy for the presidency in the elections scheduled for 2005, promising to end government corruption. “It would have been much easier for her to quit politics and sit at home like others have done but she has never given up,” a Liberian political observer told the BBC News, as noted in a profile on Sirleaf on its Web site.

Sirleaf's chief opponent was George Weah, known as a soccer star and a figure with strong appeal to Liberia's masses of dispossessed young males. Sirleaf, however, appealed to Liberian women and emerged the winner with almost 60 percent of the vote in the head-to-head runoff against Weah on November 8, 2005. According to an article by correspondent Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times, supporters carried signs at her rallies that read “Ellen—she's our man!” Weah alleged that fraud had occurred, but Sirleaf won an across-the-board victory that included support from many male voters, and she was certified the winner by Liberia's national election commission. She was inaugurated as president, and as Africa's first elected female leader, on January 16, 2006. Her security forces destabilized a pair of coup attempts that were hatched after Sirleaf arranged for Taylor's extradition to Sierra Leone to face trial there.

Over her first two years in office, Sirleaf could point to some tangible successes. Foreign debt was forgiven by two of Liberia's biggest creditors, the United States and China, and Indian steelmaker Mittal announced a billion-dollar investment in new mining operations that were set to create 3,500 jobs. Partial water and electric service was restored to Monrovia, and Sirleaf implemented financial controls, in line with the suggestions of international monetary authorities, that increased government revenues. With growth running at 8 percent a year in 2007, Liberia had set out on the long road to recovery. Another significant change, however, was that Liberians now respected their government as a positive force. Samuel Kofi Woods II, the president's minister of labor, told Charlayne Hunter-Gault in an article in Essence magazine that Sirleaf's most important contribution had been the way she had changed the nature of political leadership. “I think now the government has political will,” he said, and it was Sirleaf who had brought that will to bear. In 2006 Time magazine named her to its TIME 100 list of important leaders and revolutionaries, which featured an essay by U.S. First Lady Laura Bush stating that Sirleaf's “courage and commitment to her country are an inspiration to me and women around the world.”

Books

Newsmakers, Issue 3, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Periodicals

African Business, March 2007.

Economist (US), December 16, 2006.

Essence, October 2006.

New York Times, November 12, 2005.

Time, May 8, 2006.

Online

“Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's tribal roots and Americo Liberian background,” Liberia Past and Present, http://www.liberiapastandpresent.org/JohnsonSirleaf/TribalRoots.htm (January 20, 2008).

“President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf: President of Liberia,” Join Africa, http://www.joinafrica.com/africa_of_the_week/ellenjohnsonliberia.htm (January 20, 2008).

“Profile: Liberia's ‘Iron Lady,’ ” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4395978.stm] (January 20, 2008).

“Profile of Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,” Embassy of Liberia, http://www.embassyofliberia.org/biography.htm (January 20, 2008).