Sirleaf's second chance

The election looked like a walkover for Johnson-Sirleaf. In the runoff in November 2011 she notched up 90.7 percent of the votes cast. But Peter Quaqua, President of the Press Union of Liberia, is disappointed.

"There are too many people who feel that they have been left out of what's happening in society," he told Deutsche Welle. "There are too many things that I'm sure other people are anticipating to see in the coming years."

Also, Quaqua feels, the old problems are still there. From widespread corruption to the problems in creating new jobs. "People have the feeling they're not getting a piece of the national cake," he said.

Getting down to business

While Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's first term in office was buoyed by the euphoria of many Liberians, delighted that the 14-year civil war was now a thing of the past, her fellow countrymen and women are now watching her very closely. Her election promises must be followed by action, said Peter Quaqua. Top priority must be the creation of new jobs. Unemployment is currently around 80 percent. Especially among the young male population, there is enormous explosive potential, said Michael Keating, a development specialist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and an expert in post-conflict states.

"The challenge of what to do with Liberian youth is to provide them with a future," Keating told Deutsche Welle. "The sheer numbers of unemployed youth, they are like gasoline on the ground waiting for somebody to light a match. That did not occur during the election. We had flashes of it. We saw the potential of it."

The elections were followed by riots in the capital Monrovia in which four people died.

Clamping down on corruption

But President Johnson-Sirleaf does hold a number of trump cards. The land is rich in raw materials and Johnson-Sirleaf was widely praised for her success in attracting new investors during her first term. Contracts to mine iron ore were signed with the world's largest steel producer Arcelor Mittal and there's a deal with Chevron to drill for oil off the Liberian coast. The hope is that such partnerships will bring both money and jobs into the country.

But the exploitation of natural resources is not without problems, notably corruption.

"That remains one of the serious challenges the president has," Peter Quaqua said. "As the president said, this term will be the term of punishment. In the last six years not much was done. We just talked about it and the awareness was created but many people went free." Quaqua would like to see stiff legal measures introduced. That's the only way to deter people, he believes.

A further bad mark for Johnson-Sirleaf's first term as president is the failure to create stable, reputable political institutions. Michael Keating points to the sacking of the head of the electoral commission for bias, or when security forces opened fire on demonstrators. Such incidents, Keating believes, severely dented people's confidence in state institutions.

In his view, Johnson-Sirleaf is an individual with a strong personality but her government has failed her. "At heart, she has good intentions but she has been unable to break the pattern of patronage in how she has selected her government officials. So the ministries either collapsed from corruption or because of incompetence, or they collapsed because of lack of support from outside helpers," Keating said.

Life-support system

Investment in a functioning education system is tremendously important, Keating added. A well-educated young section of the population is a prerequisite for an enlightened, politicized society. While financial injections and help from international partners for Liberia are important, in the long term a state of dependence on foreign institutions will not pay off, he warns.

"Liberia is almost like a country that's on a life-support system in the hospital. You've got all these wires plugged in. You've got the UN Mission UNMIL or the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Every NGO in the world is in Liberia. It's really not clear how healthy the patient is. You've got all of these different outside forces maintaining little pieces of it."

For Keating, the big question is: if everyone were to go away, what would remain of Liberia?

Author: Stefanie Duckstein /sh
Editor: Mark Caldwell / rm