Word: sirleaf
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...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...
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...
...their way into the hands of legislators responsible for approving mining deals. Last year, according to witnesses, a senior Liberian official greeted a delegation of foreign funders at his office apparently drunk and demanded one delegate sit properly or "get your ass out of here." The same month Johnson Sirleaf admitted she was "hurt ... deeply wounded" by the "very embarrassing" publication of e-mails from her former assistant Willis Knuckles, detailing his apparent soliciting of hefty bribes from foreign companies. (Knuckles, now under investigation by a new anticorruption commission, claimed someone hacked into his Yahoo account and sent the requests...