Word: africas
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Liberia represents one of the best tests of Africa's capacity for regeneration. A small nation with a population of just 3 to 5 million - the new government has yet to conduct a reliable census - it has a reformist leader, two ports, rich resources and a history of exporting. In the 1950s, rubber powered economic growth of 8%, second only to Japan that decade. Fixing Liberia should still be a relative cinch. "It's everybody's favorite model," says a Western economist in Monrovia. "If it doesn't work here, it doesn't work anywhere...
...Baines plays striker. "It's moving so quickly," says Nelson Hill, 39, BRE's nursery manager. "When the company arrived, people were just sitting around. Most people had never had a job. Now people are singing in the fields." McCall MacBain, who plans to replicate the model elsewhere in Africa, says the most common reaction he receives from aid workers who visit is: "This is what we need to be doing...
Liberia is far from out of the woods. Violent crime is rising. Johnson Sirleaf admits to "a capacity problem" in the professional classes, including government. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so effective in postapartheid South Africa, has seen little of either in Liberia. Property rights remain confused. Concessions granted under Taylor amounted to almost three times Liberia's total forest area. (See pictures of Johnson Sirleaf...
...better times. "Before, the only work was fighting," says BRE nursery manager Hill. "Now there's a new vision for our people. The idea of a gun is being replaced by the idea of a job." There in a sentence is the new hope for Liberia, and all Africa...
When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa's first elected woman President in 2006, she inherited a country shattered by nearly two decades of civil war. Harvard educated, a former banker and World Bank official, and an opposition leader who was jailed in the 1990s, Johnson Sirleaf had natural allies in the West and at home won widespread support for her promise of egalitarian development. But the test for Liberia's "Iron Lady" was always going to be in the doing. She spoke to Africa bureau chief Alex Perry at Liberia's Foreign Ministry in Monrovia...