Create an FP account to save articles to read later and in the FP mobile app.

Sign Up

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Is Sirleaf still a star?

The last time I saw Monrovia in 2005, there wasn’t much of a city to describe. Buildings were riddled with bullets, roads had so many potholes it was hard to tell at which elevation they were actually supposed to be. Markets were built next to trash dumps and there were children living in cemetaries. Despite ...

By Elizabeth Dickinson, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Colombia.

June 1, 2010, 8:59 PM

The last time I saw Monrovia in 2005, there wasn't much of a city to describe. Buildings were riddled with bullets, roads had so many potholes it was hard to tell at which elevation they were actually supposed to be. Markets were built next to trash dumps and there were children living in cemetaries. Despite all that, I found it infinitely more hopeful than Sierra Leone, where I had been coming from. And much of the reason for that hope lay in one woman: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who back then had just been elected president.

The last time I saw Monrovia in 2005, there wasn’t much of a city to describe. Buildings were riddled with bullets, roads had so many potholes it was hard to tell at which elevation they were actually supposed to be. Markets were built next to trash dumps and there were children living in cemetaries. Despite all that, I found it infinitely more hopeful than Sierra Leone, where I had been coming from. And much of the reason for that hope lay in one woman: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who back then had just been elected president.

Today, as Dino Mahtani reports for FP, much has improved. But Sirleaf’s record may not be as unblotted as I (and the entire Western donor community) imagined. Much of the concern boils down to one word: corruption. Whether the fight against it has been hindered by politics, resources, or the need to temper change with compromise, progress has been disappointing.

Global Witness, an organization that focuses on the transparency of resource extraction, is also worried about Sirleaf’s Liberia for another reason: timber and diamonds. The very industries that so illicitly funded that country’s decades of conflict are up for extraction again, and it doesn’t look pretty. "In its rush to restart its forest and mining sectors, the Liberian government is making the same mistakes that in the past have resulted in natural resource-fuelled instability, corruption and poverty," Global Witness wrote in a press release last week. Specifically, the group is worried that timber concessions aren’t getting due diligence, millions are disappearing into a mining industry that is not yet transparent, and the the country doesn’t have control over the export of diamonds. Together, those things could open enormous opportunities for the crooked, the corrupt, or worse.

Is all this a minor blight on a government met by such an overwhelming situation just a half-decade ago? Probably. I certainly can’t imagine the government doing much better than it has. But then, the bar in Liberia was set tragically low.

Elizabeth Dickinson is International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Colombia.

Tag: Africa