Washington, DC — Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a veteran development official and politician who scored an unexpected victory in Liberia's presidential run-off last month, is currently on a brief private visit to the United States. Planned as a low-key affair, her trip has become a whirlwind of events and appointments, as interest in her status as Africa's first woman president has ballooned. On Monday in New York she met with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and was hosted at a dinner by the Business Council for International Understanding and the Corporate Council on Africa. The financier George Soros invited a group of private investors to lunch with the president-elect Tuesday. Wednesday, after both breakfast and lunch events, she will attend a dinner hosted by the Leon Sullivan Foundation, which was so oversubscribed that its waiting list of several hundred was itself closed. Sirleaf is slated to meet the U.S. secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury on Thursday before returning home.
When she takes office on January 16, she will be in charge of a countryemerging from 14 years of savage conflict that displaced most of the population and left even the capitol, Monrovia, without electricity or running water. A generation of children grew up without schooling, and tens of thousands were forced by armed factions into being soldiers or sex slaves.
Most immediately, Sirleaf must contend with claims by international football superstar George Weah, her opponent in the run-off election on October 11, that he was denied the presidency by fraud. The day Sirleaf met Annan at the United Nations, whose peacekeepers have been enforcing Liberia's post-war calm, Weah supporters clashed with police in the streets of the capitol, and officials of his Congress for Democratic Change, or CDC, have threatened to block the inauguration, although Weah has denied that his party is behind the violence. This week Liberia's transitional government said it was investigating reports "gathered from intelligence and security sources" of a possible coup plot.
In an interview with AllAfrica, Sirleaf discussed the challenges of national reconstruction and reclaiming a future of hope for Liberia's people.
You won a hotly contested campaign, surging ahead of a candidate who the conventional wisdom said would win, by emphasizing your experience and your plan to rebuild the country. In the process, you created high expectations. Are you concerned that those expectations will outstrip your government's capacity to deliver?
We are going to try to manage those expectations. In the first instance, we are going to set out a development agenda that is realistic and consistent with our own resources - human, financial and natural. We are going to set an agenda that is time-bound, letting people know through proper communication what exactly we are able to achieve with what we have, what time it will take to achieve it. And we will make regular reports on the progress. If one communicates to the Liberian people exactly what we are, what we can do, what we will achieve, then I think those expectations will become realistic.
But we want them to also feel like change is on the way, that we are going to make progress and that we want them to be part of that progress - by putting everyone to work in keeping with their own capacity and interest. We want them to see hope in the future. If that means expectation, we will just make sure that we are realistic in telling them how we are going to achieve our development goals, and I think we can carry the Liberian people with us.
Your recent trip around West Africa and your visit to the United States have shown that there's a lot of enthusiasm and goodwill towards you. How do you propose to use that to Liberia's advantage?
We must move quickly to harness all this goodwill. To do that, we need to reconcile and unify the Liberian population, get all of the contesting groups together. We need to find the means to address the needs of our war-affected youth, and then, as I said, we must communicate a very clear, realistic and time-bound development agenda that attempts to set out goals around which the goodwill and the support that we now have can support that agenda. Part of that effort will be to get the government machinery working again with effectiveness and efficiency, and with full accountability and transparency, to be able to address the corruption that has characterized our operations for so long.
How do you go about achieving that reconciliation? What about Mr. Weah,who is claiming that he is the rightful winner?
We are committed to a government of inclusion. We are very committed to that, reaching across political party lines, ethnic lines, religious lines, and trying to bring into the government, as much as possible, those who meet our basic standards, standards of competence, integrity and human rights promotion. I think that will go a long way.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Weah has not accepted the results that truly reflect the wishes of the Liberian people, but we hope he will come around and get over his disappointment and see what he can do. At the same time, the security of the state is paramount. We hope that his young people will realize that that cannot be sacrificed in any way. We must preserve the security of the State to enable us bring people together and start on our development agenda.
Liberia has resources to finance development.
Liberia has a lot of natural resources, some of it already being exploited through concession agreements and contracts. We are going to look at those concession agreements and contracts and make sure they are in the national interest. If they are, or can be made to be, then we want to give the encouragement necessary to make sure resources are available to support our development agenda. We want to start getting our displaced people and people in camps back to their farms so they can be self-sufficient, because we do have the means to produce much of our own food needs.
Then we need to explore the other natural resources we have and create the environment of peace and stability to attract capital and private investment to exploit those resources. All of this, of course, will take a bit of time. But I think if we get our policies right, we can then attract this investment. The natural resources we have, which are ample for our relatively small population of three million, can accelerate the development effort, and very quickly we can see our growth rate increase and per capita income and purchasing power improved, and the economy then takes on more momentum. Those are the things we will be working on, so we can get them started very early in the New Year after the inauguration.
You've been outspoken about the contribution women can make to development, and of course women played an important role in your own election. How do you plan to promote gender equality in the government and in the society?
First of all, we hope that the composition of the government will give a strong signal about the important role that women must play, and then we want to look at the laws and the practices as regards the protection of women. We want to focus on the girl-child and giving girls the opportunity for education. Women's organizations - we want to get them strengthened so that they can respond to the specific needs of women. And I think setting the example ourselves and encouraging women to take leadership roles and take active roles in all aspects of our national endeavor will begin to bring about the gender equality that we know is so important to get the best in our society.
What kind of support do you hope to attract from the United States and the international community more generally?
We are looking for both technical and financial support. From the United States, we want support to reactivate the process of getting our external debt resolved. It is very high - U.S.$3.5 billion - and we will not be able to access important sources of funding unless that is resolved. So we want to work towards meeting the requirements for getting the sanctions lifted off some of our natural resources that are needed to support our development effort. We want to see the GEMAP [Governance Economic Management Action Plan, a donor-backed economic reform program], which has been talked about so much, move very rapidly into implementation, so that we can fill the gap in promoting accountability and transparency and begin the process of capacity-building. And demonstrate that we can manage out own resources effectively and efficiently and fully.
We want to see how [charitable] foundations can support some of our repatriation efforts and getting communities back at the farms and working again. There is so much that we think will put Liberia on the right track, and we know that the key to all of this is our own performance, both in terms of policy and in terms of management of our resources. We are confident that if we do our part, we will get the support from the United States, the European Commission, the United Nations.
More importantly, we need support in restructuring and professionalizing the security forces, because we will not be able to move forward with our development agenda unless the nation is secured. Those are the areas we are having discussions on right now. We have had discussions with the west African leaders. Ecowas and the African Union are very supportive of our efforts. We have also had some talks with the European Commission, while I was in transit, and now with the United States. I feel very confident that, if we do the right things, we will get the support that we need.
You were well received in west Africa. How does regional cooperation fit into your plans?
That is very important. We must have the support and understanding of our neighboring countries to make sure that regional stability is secured. Then there is the whole issue of regional cooperation, being able to work with the Ecowas [Economic Community of West African States] secretariat, [Ecowas Executive Secretary] Dr. Mohammed Chambas and his people who are promoting regional integration. We want to come up with common economic programs to improve the mobility of goods and services across borders and thereby create the economies of scale and the potential to attract private investment on a regional basis in those cases where domestic markets are quite small. I am grateful I was well received by the African leaders, and I think we are going to have clear understanding as to how we can get the countries working together to achieve these regional development objectives.
Are you confident that the region has turned the corner on conflict, which has created so much pain and destruction in recent years?
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
No. The peace is still extremely fragile in Liberia and in the sub-region as well. We have pockets of disenchanted elements in the society that have not accepted the fact that the Liberian people have given us a mandate for change. They haven't accepted that the Liberian people want to move forward. These elements like the status quo. They have a vested interest in seeing the current situation remain in place, and we know they are going to try to do things to undermine the potential and the progress that we are setting in train.
We are not out of the woods yet, but we have to take all action with the support of our regional partners and the international community, including the United Nations mission in Liberia, to address those pockets of discontent. We will try to reach out to them in a positive way and get them to see the benefit for joining in the development effort. But in those cases where they remain very recalcitrant, then they will have to be identified, to deal with it, so that the nation's progress is not impeded.
One issue you are facing is what to do about Charles Taylor. There are strong voices here in the United States calling on you to request his extradition from Nigeria, so he can be tried by the Special Court in Sierra Leone, where he has been indicted for war crimes in connection with the civil war in that country.
Let me say that in the consultations that I have had recently with the African leaders and European leaders and now the United States, we are going to find a solution that resolves the Charles Taylor issue. I think we should leave it at that for now. Proper solutions that meet African leaders' requirements as well as the international community's requirements will be found, and we will deal with it.
So you feel that you can move forward, despite the effort of George Weah and his supporters to contest the election outcome?
The Liberian people have given us a mandate for change, a mandate to set our country on the road to respectability, to peace, reconciliation and development, and we should all continue to be committed to that goal, despite the distractions that are taking place. I am convinced that the Liberian people, with the support of the international community will move on and will see progress in a very, very short period of time.
RELATED:
Enthusiasm Follows Unexpected Victory As Sirleaf Receives High-Level Reception in Washington
U.S.Reiterates Fairness of Election and Warns Against Violence
