Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Africa's first elected woman head of state.
Full detail, evidence and debate
Elected president of Liberia in 2005 after fourteen years of civil war had destroyed the state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf stabilised the country, cleared crippling external debt, oversaw the first peaceful transfer of power between elected Liberian presidents in seventy-three years, and led through the Ebola epidemic of 2014. Liberians' assessments of her remain genuinely divided.
- Born
- 1938, Monrovia
- Trained
- Economics; Master of Public Administration, Harvard, 1971
- President
- 2006 – 2018, two terms
- Debt relief
- Roughly $4.6bn of external debt cleared
- Nobel Peace Prize
- 2011, with Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman
- Handover
- 2018 — first elected-to-elected transfer since 1944
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Before the presidency
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Born in Monrovia in 1938 to parents from indigenous Liberian communities who had been absorbed into the Americo-Liberian establishment, she married at seventeen, had four sons, and went to the United States to study economics, taking a master's in public administration at Harvard in 1971. She served as finance minister under William Tolbert, was imprisoned after the 1980 coup that killed him, escaped into exile, and worked at Citibank, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, running its Africa bureau. She ran for the senate in 1985, was jailed again, and stood against Charles Taylor in the 1997 election, losing heavily and then being charged with treason. She had also, briefly and consequentially, supported Taylor's rebellion at its outset in 1989 — a decision she later publicly regretted and for which Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended she be barred from office.
The state she inherited
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Two civil wars between 1989 and 2003 killed an estimated 250,000 people and displaced most of the population. When she took office in January 2006 Monrovia had no functioning public electricity supply and no piped water; the country had almost no paved roads outside the capital, a destroyed education system, a shattered civil service, tens of thousands of demobilised fighters, and around $4.9bn of external debt against an economy generating a small fraction of that. A UN peacekeeping mission of 15,000 was holding the security situation. This was not a government facing difficult policy choices; it was a state that had to be reconstructed from the foundations.
What her governments did
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The debt was the first priority, because nothing could be financed while it stood: by 2010 roughly $4.6bn had been cleared through the HIPC process, which required years of negotiation and fiscal discipline. Electricity and piped water returned to parts of Monrovia. Roads were rebuilt. Primary education was made free and compulsory and enrolment rose sharply. Concession agreements with mining, rubber and timber companies were reviewed and renegotiated, some cancelled outright. The security sector was rebuilt with international support and the peacekeeping mission was eventually able to draw down. GDP grew for most of her first term, and Liberia moved from a war economy to something that at least resembled a normal one.
Ebola
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The 2014 West African Ebola outbreak hit Liberia hardest, killing more than 4,800 people there. The early response was widely criticised — a quarantine of the West Point township in Monrovia turned violent, and public communication was poor at the start. What followed was more effective: mass community mobilisation, safe burial teams, treatment units built rapidly with international help, and a public health effort that got transmission to zero by 2015. The epidemic exposed exactly what fourteen years of war had done to the health system, and it consumed much of her second term's fiscal space and political capital.
The criticism
Several incompatible readings exist. We present the disagreement rather than resolving it for you.
Corruption was the persistent charge. Her own auditor-general and anti-corruption commission produced damaging findings; several officials were dismissed or prosecuted, and critics argued the pattern was too tolerant. Three of her sons held senior positions in the central bank, the national security agency and the national oil company, which she defended on competence grounds and which most Liberians read as nepotism. Poverty and unemployment remained very high, and the benefits of growth were unevenly distributed. She was expelled from her own party in 2018 for allegedly failing to support its candidate. Her earlier support for Taylor, and the TRC recommendation, remained a live grievance throughout.
How we know
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Her presidency is documented in Liberian government records, IMF and World Bank programme documentation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report, extensive local and international press coverage, and her own memoir This Child Will Be Great. The Nobel citation in 2011 — shared with the Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Yemen's Tawakkol Karman — set out the international reading of her record. Liberian civil society organisations produced sustained critical documentation throughout, which is itself evidence of the space that existed to criticise her.
The handover
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In January 2018 she handed power to George Weah, who had been defeated by her in 2005 and who won the election to succeed her. It was the first transfer of power from one elected Liberian president to another since 1944, and it happened in a country that had spent most of the preceding three decades at war or under coup government. Whatever else is disputed about her record, that transfer is not, and it is the achievement her supporters put first.
Legacy
Several incompatible readings exist. We present the disagreement rather than resolving it for you.
She was the first woman elected head of state anywhere in Africa, and the significance of that for a generation of African women in politics is difficult to overstate — Sahle-Work Zewde in Ethiopia and Samia Suluhu Hassan in Tanzania followed in a landscape she had altered. She chaired ECOWAS, co-chaired the WHO panel reviewing the global COVID-19 response, and runs a foundation supporting women's leadership in Africa. The honest summary is the one Liberians themselves give: she rebuilt a state that had ceased to function, and she did not solve the corruption and inequality that had helped destroy it in the first place.
Where to go next
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The African tech and Agenda 2063 entries cover the continental development frame; Wangari Maathai the environmental and governance argument running alongside it. The Liberia country profile covers the state and its history, including the Americo-Liberian settlement that shaped it.
Sources
- African Economic OutlookAfrican source
African Development Bank
https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge - General History of Africa, Volumes IX–XI (ongoing)African source
UNESCO · 2013–
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa
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