‘Much More to Do’, Says Johnson Sirleaf

13 June 2011

interview

Monrovia — Since taking office in early 2006 as Africa’s first elected woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has become a prominent leader in a tough job. A quarter century of political turmoil, including 14 years of conflict that displaced three-quarters of its people and killed an estimated 250,000, left Liberia without infrastructure – no electricity or water services and few roads, schools or medical facilities. Despite global recession, economic recovery is visible everywhere, but the challenges are enormous, and a United Nations peacekeeping mission is expected to remain in place, at least until after national elections in October. Interviewed Friday by AllAfrica’s Boakai Fofana, Reed Kramer and Tami Hultman, the president cited progress and discussed plans.

You often talk about Liberian children smiling again, yet you express deep concern about the rate of child mortality and other issues that affect children.

I’m glad to see the children indeed are smiling again. As I go around the country and I see them back in school, that pleases me so much.

Because of limited health facilities, particularly in the rural areas, child mortality has been quite high. But it has been coming down. Immunization has been very successful. That means we will have many more children that will live, many more children that will go to school and many more children that will smile again.

As you travel around the country, what are the main things people tell you they want from their government?

First of all, peace. They want to make sure that the stability we have enjoyed for the past, what? – the past nine years – that this will continue and that they will see no more conflict in the country.

The other thing they want most is mobility, particularly in the form of roads. We have stressed the priorities of education and health but, as they say, if you don’t have the roads to enable the kids to go to school, or to enable them to get to clinics, then having those facilities will not bring them maximum use. So we’ve put a lot of emphasis on the construction of roads – primary roads as well as secondary roads.

People also talk a lot about the health problems from lack of latrines.

We’ve not done enough for sanitation, particularly where you have overcrowding in urban areas. It becomes more noticeable and more of a health problem, as you correctly said. Clean water, latrine facilities in communities, is something we have started to place emphasis on that’s going to make a big impact on the quality of health.

What things has your administration been getting right?

There’s been a sharp reduction in child mortality. Maternal mortality still remains high, because you don’t have enough clinics; they have to rely on the traditional methods – midwifery. We’ve been trying to train the midwives to give better treatment. But, again, when the roads are fixed, it makes it easier to get to the hospital.

Going around the country before, there were certain places I would have to take a canoe to cross the river. Today there’s a bridge in most of those places, and I can drive there, although roads are not as good as they should be, and certainly we’ve got to build many more roads.

We’ve seen a big increase in education. Enrollment has shot up so much – a 40% increased enrollment in the public schools, and most of them are girls. By enforcing compulsory primary education; by making sure, through the World Food Program, that kids get a lunch, a hot meal, while in school; by giving free uniforms – that has brought up the school population.

Now the constraints are – we don’t have enough teachers. We’re concentrating on teacher training institutes, and we’ve reactivated all three of them. The Peace Corps is back – and strictly involved now in teacher training, because that’s our greatest need.

The statistics are there. We’re very pleased with the progress, although the challenges still remain many. Everything we’ve done, we’ve still got much more to do.

We’ve been hearing some concerns – from both businesses and development experts – that institutions of higher education aren’t producing enough scientists, that a large majority are studying social sciences.

The number of graduates coming out in sociology, political science – our message to them now is: if we’re going to support a scholarship program and provide subsidies, they have to go into areas that have been neglected. Most of the mining concessions are now giving scholarships for people to study engineering, geology. The agriculture concessions are now giving scholarships to study agriculture.

So the shift is starting, by our action of giving support to those who will study those disciplines. We have a lot of foreign scholarships, and in those areas we are stressing medical doctors, engineers, scientists. It will take a while.

And then there is the challenge – what do we do with all of those political science graduates, sociology graduates? We’re encouraging some to be retrained, using the basic education that they have, but shifting to a more specialized area that will enable them to broaden their professional options.

But what about the fact that chemistry classes don’t have labs and computer classes don’t have enough computers?

The more schools you open, the less capable you are to equip them properly.   We’ve been working with some partners to get science and lab equipment. We’re just clearing the ports now with a gift of equipment that came from India – science labs that will be placed in high schools. Even sufficient books are things we have to continue to work on. This is like starting from scratch and rebuilding a nation from one that was a virgin state, but we’ve had good partners who have worked with us on this.

In your first election campaign, you promised to restore electricity to a country that had none. What has happened to that goal?

It’s been slow. Capacity is one of the issues.

First of all, we started off with what we promised. We said that we were going to bring electricity back in six months. We didn’t say we were going to electrify the country in six months! We brought it back through the introduction of street lights, where street lights have been missing for two decades. We’re happy with the response – children dancing in the streets, studying under the street lights.

Since then we’ve been trying to expand, but building power is a high capital cost, something which our budget couldn’t afford. So we’ve been working with partners, adding new units. All the new units are thermal units; they use fuel oil, and the rising price of petroleum is a constraint. But we have gone from zero to about 21 megawatts – not enough, but we should be electrifying many of the communities in the Monrovia area by the end of this month.

The most cost-efficient means of power is to rehab and expand our hydro facilities, but the capital costs are high. To do what we want is $300 million dollars – which was more than two times the size of our [annual] budget! So we want to also bring in the private sector and see if we can, through independent power producers, restore some power, and we are now working very actively with partners to get some work done on the hydro.

Why haven’t you borrowed funds to restore hydroelectric capacity? The St. Paul River alone is capable of generating enough power that you could export some and earn revenues – while combating climate change, as you’ve said you want to do.

Liberia could not borrow. We had a $4.9 billion external debt that had not been serviced for 20 years, much of it representing accumulated interest.

That’s why we put our emphasis on the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative , working with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.   I think Liberia has the record on that, that in three years we were able to reach the completion point on the HIPC.   Right now we are signing bilateral agreements in which, under the Paris Club, we got a 100% waiver, again unprecedented – and now we are virtually debt free. (I shouldn’t say totally debt free – there are little segments of debt.)

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