Word: sirleaf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...started again in 1999, the reporters returned, followed by mercenaries, and then - with the arrival of a second fragile peace after President Charles Taylor's defeat and exile in 2003 - a wild-eyed group of Western carpetbaggers after a quick buck. It was only when Harvard-educated Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won office as Africa's first elected woman head of state in 2005 and promised wholesale reform that the Mamba Point began to welcome what Bsaibes calls "respectables" - executives from multinationals eyeing Liberia for opportunities and, to Bsaibe's delight, government ministers. "This is the only time we feel that...
...countries like Botswana and Mauritius and businessmen like Bsaibes, whose 19th century Lebanese forebears were tricked into disembarking in Liberia after buying passage to America, but who thrived anyway. But the exceptions only highlighted how far the rest of Africa was falling short. (Read an interview with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf...
...more, with Liberia expecting 4.9% growth in 2009 and 7.5% next year. While the G-8 leaders discuss how to help, some parts of Africa are getting on with business. "Whereas Africa had military rule and dictatorships, today we have 18 or 19 functioning democracies," Johnson Sirleaf tells TIME. "Africa is growing equal to or better than all other regions. We have gone from [a stance of] noninterference in our internal affairs to respect for the principle of the responsibility to protect, so that today Africa is intervening in African countries where governments have suppressed the rights of their...
...Liberia, Johnson Sirleaf is doing better. She set a three-year poverty-reduction strategy whose four pillars are peace and security, governance and the rule of law, infrastructure and basic services, and economic revitalization. A U.N. peacekeeping force and an embargo on arms are keeping conflict at bay. Schools and hospitals have reopened. Tax receipts are up. Bureaucracy is down. U.N. sanctions on diamond and timber exports have been lifted. Liberia is attracting foreign investment in iron ore, timber, palm oil and construction. Though steel giant Arcelor Mittal recently mothballed a $1.5 billion project to reopen an iron-ore mine...
...coup d'etat. On Saturday, Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, came to Ghana to speak about the continent in the personal and the particular, as his own ancestral homeland for which he now offered a vision. (See TIME's photos of Liberia's Ellen Johnson Sirleaf...