Word: tubman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...full name was William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, but to 1.5 million Liberians he was simply "Old Daddy." As President for 27 years of the Ohio-size West African rubber republic, he was the oldest, established, permanent, doting, elected patriarch on the continent. Indeed, so popular was Old Daddy with his subjects that the only thing that could oust him from office was death. The ouster came last week, when the 75-year-old President succumbed to complications following a prostate-gland operation in a London hospital...
...Westerners, Tubman was a faintly improbable figure in a top hat and cutaway, a stickler for formality who lived in a $6 million, neon-lit palace. To his people, he was a father figure, accessible and gregarious, always ready to hoof a lively quadrille, Liberia's national dance. He sought to present an air of omniscience, insisting on approving all government expenditures of more than $200 and even extending his jurisdiction down to settling his staff's marital problems...
...years of stability to two basic policies. One is an open-door policy in regard to foreign investment. The other is his Integration and Unification Program, an effort to erase divisions between Americo-Liberians and the tribal people and to stop intertribal warfare. To still tribal rivalries, Tubman traveled far and wide through the bush to attend palavers with local chiefs, even became grand master of the secret Poro societies, to which all of Liberia's 28 tribes belong. He has extended the vote to the tribal people and banned the term Americo-Liberian. Says...
...Great Tree. His open-door economic policies have brought relative progress to Liberia. Foreign investment now amounts to nearly $750 million-mostly in iron ore, rubber and commercial banking. Tubman checks economic performance continually: an old law still on the books has it that all government expenditures of more than $200 must be approved by the President, and the President spends hours every week poring over the ledgers. As a result, important government work tends to be held...
There are more serious complaints: despite Tubman's economic gains, a large number of Liberia's 1,000,000 people still eke out all too meager an existence while the heirs of the old elite and government officials live handsomely. The 1969 austerity budget of $61 million, for instance, sets aside $37 million for government expenditure, including salaries, but only one-tenth that amount for development. Tubman's own annual salary as chief executive is $25,000. Agriculture has so far been given short shrift in economic planning. Graft and corruption abound, and Tubman's True...