allAfrica.com: Liberia: Showered With Enthusiasm, Liberia's President-Elect Receives High-Level Reception in Washington (Page 1 of 4)

Liberia: Showered With Enthusiasm, Liberia's President-Elect Receives High-Level Reception in Washington

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."

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