Reed Kramer
11 December 2005
analysis
Washington, DC — Having beaten the odds to win (helped by some polls and a helicopter), Africa's first female elected president faces daunting challenges.
When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf launched her campaign to become president of Liberia, conventional wisdom rated her chances as slim to none.
No African woman had ever won a presidential election. The presumed front-runner, George Weah, was a charismatic political novice, three decades her junior, whose international soccer fame had made him a national hero and household name, especially among Liberia's largely unemployed youth. To stand a chance of winning, Sirleaf had to find a way to rise to the top of a heap that included 21 other candidates.
Among those who did not expect Sirleaf to triumph were U.S. officials who track African developments. According to government sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to give on-the-record interviews, almost all U.S. intelligence and diplomatic reporting pointed to Weah as the near-certain winner, an outcome that was privately favored by at least some of the policymakers most closely involved. After her victory was certified, however, President George Bush telephoned his congratulations, and on a private visit to the United States this week Sirleaf is being courted by top administration officials and leading members of Congress.
While in Washington Friday, in addition to seeing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, she met at the White House with National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and his Africa deputy, Cindy Courville. On Wednesday, she is scheduled to meet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary John Snow, along with members of the House and Senate, including Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Congressional Black Caucus. Liberia's relationship with the United States is the longest lasting in Africa, dating from 1822, when freed slaves went ashore from a U.S. Navy vessel sponsored by the American Colonization Society, whose members included the incumbent U.S. president, James Monroe, for whom the capital city was named when the settlers declared Liberia a sovereign republic in 1847.
Outpourings of public support for the president-elect have been widespread. During a recent tour of West African capitals, she was greeted with rare enthusiasm, including a standing ovation at the Franco-Africa summit in Bamako, Mali, attended by 53 African leaders and French President Jacques Chirac, who invited her to visit Paris.
Ellen, as she is increasingly known - like a Pelé or a Madonna, needing no last name - is also receiving a warm welcome among Liberians living in the United States. Although each of the leading candidates in the presidential race received backing from U.S.-based support groups, Sirleaf's supporters were among the most active. A group called "Family, Friends and Well-Wishers of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf" raised funds, organized rallies, and, last week after her victory became official, held a thanksgiving service in Washington, DC.
"This is a wonderful development for our country," said D. Elwood Dunn, a Liberian who is professor of political science at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. "It's almost like she has been training for this throughout her career."
Last year, before campaigning was permitted inside Liberia, a group called 'Liberians for Ellen' set up a web site to mobilize support for Sirleaf's candidacy among Liberians in the United States. "Many Liberians did not want to break from their parties, but they wanted to back Ellen," says the group's founder, Amara Konneh, a 35-year old information specialist living in Philadelphia. Konneh says he has admired Sirleaf "ever since her campaign in 1985," when she won election to the Senate but refused to take the seat to protest electoral misconduct by then-head-of-state, Samuel K. Doe, a former army sergeant who, having seized power in a 1980 coup, sought to legitimize his military regime with a staged victory at the polls.
Konneh left Liberia during the civil war in 1990 after his father and three brothers, along with an uncle and his family, were killed in the war. "My ethnic group was targeted, and I narrowly escaped death myself, so I went to Guinea to join my sister in a refugee camp," Konneh says. From money he earned there working on local farms, he started a school and later became a regional coordinator for refugee schools in Guinea, where over 500,000 Liberians took refuge from the fighting in their homeland during the 1990s. He managed to gain asylum in the United States, where he worked his way through school, earning a bachelor's degree in 1996 before earning his Master's from Drexel University.
In July of this year on a visit to Monrovia to explore ways to boost Sirleaf's chances, Konneh decided he could best contribute by putting his computer skills to work. Before going, Konneh says he studied American political operatives like James Carville and Karl Rove for pointers on how successful campaigns are run. He conducted a quick poll of 800 youths in the capital to find out how Sirleaf was regarded and charted the results on a spreadsheet. "My results were very surprising," he says. "They liked her, but they said they weren't too sure about the old people because the old politicians had failed them."
Along with Washington-based political consultant Riva Levinson, Konneh helped Sirleaf and her political team utilize the polling data to shape her campaign message. Levinson, who also worked on Sirleaf's 1997 campaign, "is bright and politically connected," Konneh says. "She was our secret weapon." After the July visit, Levinson, managing director at BKSH and Associates, a government-relations firm headed by prominent Republican fundraiser Charles Black, advised Sirleaf in a memorandum to position herself as "a strong and capable woman" who will battle to make a better future for the country. Emphasize energy and "avoid any clothes (especially hats) that someone's grandmother might wear," Levinson suggested to Sirleaf, who has four sons and six grand children.
With Weah in the spotlight, Sirleaf was struggling for visibility. "We wanted to draw attention to the fact that Ellen could become the first woman elected to lead a modern African nation," Levinson says. "We kept saying this but were drowned out by Weah's soccer superstardom and the 'conventional wisdom' that he was bound to win." When the Times of London's Prue Clarke, in a dispatch from Monrovia on July 30, called the election "a two-horse race" between Weah and Sirleaf and mentioned that she could be Africa's first elected female president, the campaign team was elated. "This was our tipping point" in international perceptions, Levinson says, citing successive stories in the European and North American press that picked up the same theme.
In August, Konneh returned to Liberia to carry out more extensive polling in the six of the 15 counties with the largest number of registered voters. "We also included her home county of Bomi, because we didn't want her to end up as Liberia's Al Gore," who lost his home state of Tennessee in the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, Konneh said. He designed a questionnaire, hired 20 university students and gave them a crash course on interviewing techniques. To analyze the findings, he added more elaborate formulas and graphs to his spreadsheet. The polling helped determine the areas of the country where Sirleaf was best placed to get the most votes.
The polling numbers painted a sobering picture. Weah had a clear lead. Charles Brumskine was running second, with Sirleaf trailing in third place. "When we asked voters the most important issue for the country, they named education," Konneh says. Ironically, a large number felt that Weah, who dropped out of secondary school to play soccer, could be trusted to deliver education to the youth. Presented with the findings, Sirleaf gave more attention to her stand on the importance of education and on her broad experience. "She kept pounding these themes, and resources were re-allocated to get the message across," he said. And she kept reaching out to her natural constituency, women voters.
Sirleaf's team recognized that their most valuable asset was the candidate herself. "The average market person felt very comfortable with her, and she was comfortable with them," Maryland political consultant Larry Gibson told the Associated Press. A law professor who managed the 1992 Clinton/Gore campaign in Maryland and three successful campaigns for Baltimore's first black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, Gibson said he agreed to help Sirleaf at the urging of his friend Harry Greaves, a top Sirleaf lieutenant, after deciding "Ellen was the best chance for the country." Greaves credits Gibson with boosting Sirleaf's profile with tactical advice and effective campaign posters and bumper stickers purchased for bargain prices in China.
Read comments. Write your own.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
Liberia will be resurected. Liberia 4 Jesus.