Word: liberia
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...from Britain in 1957, was overthrown following widespread discontent over food shortages, corruption and extravagant government spending. Ghana has since become a case study in African nationalism gone wrong, and lately a prototype for young African countries beset with similar problems. In West Africa, Guinea-Bissau, Upper Volta and Liberia have all suffered similar revolutions within the past two years; The Gambia and Sierra Leone have narrowly avoided similar revolts. Much of the difficulty, as Rawlings insists, stems from government elites that squander resources and are unable to control their economies...
...discouraged to learn that while we are slashing budgets in the U.S., we are giving Liberia's ruthless Samuel Doe $68.3 million [Sept. 21]. We help pay the country's oil bill, send it rice and build barracks for its army when our men in Germany have to live in quarters built 200 years ago. If we kept our money at home, perhaps then we could balance our budget...
That trend worries some Liberian officials. "Most of us feel that America is more comfortable with these people than with some intellectuals who might pursue a more independent foreign policy." says one Monrovia official. "We don't see the U.S. doing much to persuade Doe to return Liberia to the civilians. Unless something unforeseen forces him to step down, we think Doe will be in power for at least five more years." The skeptics are not assured by the fact that a commission has begun to draft a new constitution and is expected to complete it before...
...stability any time soon. One reminder is the conduct of Colonel Harrison Pennue, a former corporal and Doe loyalist who likes to boast that he disemboweled President Tolbert. Doe appointed Pennue to a P.R.C. committee charged with collecting $36 million owed by private debtors to the defunct Bank of Liberia. So far, says a foreign businessman, "not one cent" of the millions of dollars in cash that Pennue collected has been turned over to the central bank. On the same day that Doe met with Western diplomats and businessmen to inform them that shakedowns would stop, Pennue ordered his bodyguards...
Despite the P.R.C.'s excesses, the U.S. Government remains supportive of the regime. While total foreign aid has been drastically slashed by the Reagan Administration, U.S. annual assistance to Liberia has leaped from $8 million during the last year of Tolbert's presidency to $68.3 million this year, an increase, at a time of general retrenchment, that Washington explains as due to the fact that there is "no visible alternative" to the Doe regime. The U.S. is helping to pay Liberia's monthly oil bill of $12 million, supplying more than 20,000 tons of rice...