Harvard-educated economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was inaugurated as Africa’s first elected woman president in January. The country’s elections came after 15 years of civil war that ended in 2003.
That year also marked an end to armed conflicts with neighbouring countries and United Nations sanctions.
As a result of this recent history, Liberia is now one of the most impoverished countries on the African continent. Average life expectancy is 42 years and the yearly per capita income is $130.
Ruling Africa’s oldest republic, which was founded in 1847 by freed American and Caribbean slaves, Johnson-Sirleaf is fully aware of the challenges facing a country in economic ruin, with dire shortages of food, water and power, and overrun with weapons and thousands of child soldiers.
What are your most urgent priorities?
Right now we are trying to consolidate the peace process, put our finances and our house in order, and get the government machinery operating efficiently and effectively.
We have formulated a very ambitious agenda for development and for restoring our infrastructure, roads, schools, hospitals, et cetera. And we are trying to emphasise education, because many of our young people have not been to school for a long time owing to the many years of conflict.
What are the fields in which you consider international cooperation most needed?
We would particularly like our partners to help in the area of social infrastructure — to help us get our schools repaired, particularly our technical and vocational schools, because we have so many young people who are affected by the war, either as combatants or as victims, and who are now unemployed, who are right there on the street.
As a matter of fact, unemployment is one of our biggest challenges: 85% of the workforce is not working today, because our private sector was not functioning as most of the companies who were operating or going to invest have left.
Several donors tend to react mostly to emergency situations, but some of them now believe that a key tool is helping countries to develop.
Do you believe in a north-south alliance for that purpose?
Absolutely. But we think that development cooperation needs to change its focus. Humanitarian aid and funds that are spent for peacekeeping, where conflicts have happened, cost much more than preventing conflicts, putting people to work and putting them in school in their own country.
We want to see, in Africa, our own factories that can produce and create jobs. We want to have our own transport system … for our own mobility and trade.
I tell people interested in assisting us: we do not want you to give us scholarships to send our children to your schools; help us to build our schools so our children can go to school here. We need to change the whole thinking about development.
More than one-third of the time allocated to achieving the Millennium Development Goals has now elapsed. How do you evaluate the results obtained so far in Liberia?
In the case of Liberia, we are far behind in meeting the goals, because of our situation, the wars, too many transitional governments, et cetera.
But Liberia is going to catch up. I am not sure that we will be able to meet all the goals by 2015, because we only have nine years left. But we are going to accelerate the pace. — IPS