Jail Fails to Deter U.S.-Educated Leader : ‘Boss’ Still Has Trouble With Woman in Liberia

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, educated in Madison, Wis., and Cambridge, Mass., formerly of the World Bank and on leave from Citibank, was arrested one afternoon and spent the first night of seven months in prison on a concrete floor.

People with flashlights kept waking her up.

“They wanted to see this woman who was putting their boss through all this trouble,” she recalled recently.

The woman who aggravated His Excellency the President Samuel K. Doe was freed this summer, the last political prisoner released by Doe under pressure from the United States.

Doe and the government have let it be known that they expect gratitude and thanks from their freed political prisoners, but Johnson-Sirleaf asks, “Why should I say ‘thank you’ to somebody for keeping me in jail for seven months?”

If anything, she is now causing the boss more headaches than before.

Johnson-Sirleaf, 47, has become a new national hero here--and the biggest threat to Doe. She also is one of the most important women in African politics, and political observers here say that she could one day become the first woman president on the continent.

Democracy took a beating here back in October, when Liberia’s multiparty election was marred by a controversial vote count that kept Doe in power. An abortive military coup was launched two weeks after the results were announced. In its aftermath, about 400 political opponents and others were jailed.

Politics Resurfacing

But this summer, all over Monrovia, political talk is resurfacing. And for Johnson-Sirleaf, there are people to see, strategies to discuss, hands to shake.

Johnson-Sirleaf, reading glasses perched on her nose, was sitting one recent morning in a room about the size of a prison cell, dark because no one had paid the electricity bill and hot because the only window was high on the wall.

The building, a few blocks from where Liberia was founded 139 years ago by freed slaves from America, is headquarters for the Liberian Action Party. The room is for talking politics.

Johnson-Sirleaf was surrounded by men who, like her, have been to college in the United States and to prison in Liberia. A steady stream of visitors came through the door, walking from person to person and shaking hands the Liberian way--hands gripping, sliding slowly apart and ending with snaps of the fingers.

The contrast between the country’s leader and his political opponents is striking. Doe, a military man and high school dropout, was a 28-year-old master sergeant when he staged a coup six years ago, overthrowing President William R. Tolbert Jr. The title he uses, Dr. Doe, is honorary, from a university in South Korea.

Johnson-Sirleaf, the daughter of a former Liberian legislator, has a degree in accounting from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard. She has worked for the World Bank in Washington, was once Liberia’s finance minister and is on leave from her job as vice president of the Citibank branch in Nairobi, Kenya.

She has gained a reputation for speaking her mind no matter the consequences. With each stint in prison, her criticism of the people in power increases and her popularity grows.

Run by ‘Many Idiots’

She and Doe first clashed last summer when she told a group of Liberians in the United States that “many idiots” were running her country. Doe was not amused. Upon her return to Monrovia, she was thrown into jail.

“I do believe they are idiots,” she said recently, “and I wanted them to know they were stupid.”

A month later, Doe released her. But she was among those tossed into the stockade after the Nov. 12 coup attempt. The government charged her with complicity in the coup, accusing her of joining the street celebration when it appeared that the coup had succeeded and shouting, “We did it!”

“The truth is, so many people were coming to my house that day I didn’t have time to go outside,” she said. “But I probably would have.”

The arrests that day had a curious effect on politics here. Opposition politicians who could find little common ground among themselves before the Oct. 15 election suddenly began seeing eye to eye when they were stuffed into a crowded prison cell together. As a result, three of the four major opposition parties in Liberia have formed a coalition. Johnson-Sirleaf has emerged as its leader.

Doe’s opponents are still trying to decide what to do now. Johnson-Sirleaf sees two possibilities: “Either mobilize a resentful public into rebellion against a government they do not accept, or mobilize support--domestically and internationally--to force the Doe government to reform, including a free press, an independent judiciary and giving the opposition a meaningful role in governing the state.”

Doe’s popularity in Liberia peaked shortly after he took power and has fallen precipitously since then as the level of corruption increased and his life style grew more regal. He also has engaged in manic, bloody purges of his closest advisers, and his supporters were alleged to have beaten voters on election day last October.

High Unemployment

Meanwhile, about half of Liberians are unemployed, prices have been rising and businesses are leaving. Petty harassment has become a widespread problem. Motorists often must pay bribes to pass through routine roadblocks, and government officials frequently extract “tips” for the smallest bit of business.

The United States, in Johnson-Sirleaf’s view, “has given only half-hearted support to the democratic process here.”

Liberia receives more U.S. assistance per capita, $40, than any other sub-Saharan African country. U.S. aid to Doe’s regime started at a relatively modest $15 million in 1980 but rose to $75 million in 1985 and will be $60 million this year.

Politics is a tenuous thing in Liberia. The importance of international aid is a major reason why Doe’s foes are free, political analysts say. With much of that aid suspended, Doe has been trying to clean up his record on human rights and launch a plan that might pull Liberia out of its economic slide.

Even when free, opposition members live at considerable risk. Many of them are so worried about their safety that they spend their nights away from their homes. It is one irony of Liberia that Doe also--it is widely believed--spends his nights away from the presidential mansion.

“It’s like living in an undeveloped village where there are no rules and laws--the chief just decides what he wants,” Johnson-Sirleaf said. “Doe has no respect for human life, for liberty or for laws. Because of that, every single life in this country is at stake. Anybody can do anything to you and get away with it.”

Yet she has no security guards and makes no effort to stay out of reach.

“If somebody decides to kill me, they will kill me in my own house,” she said.

Johnson-Sirleaf lives in an airy house near the beach south of Monrovia. Most of its rooms are empty; her possessions are still several thousand miles away in Nairobi, and Doe has not returned her passport to allow her to travel. A silver Toyota, with an “I Liberia” bumper sticker, is parked out front.

Inside on one recent morning, Johnson-Sirleaf was still in curlers, a kimono wrapped around her shoulders. She is slender, not much over five feet tall. Her late father was an indigenous Liberian from the Gola tribe and her mother, who lives next door, is half German.

Waiting in the dining room of her house was Weseh McClain, an accountant in his 20s who had driven from his home to see her.

“I’m just an admirer,” McClain explained.

A toaster oven and a portable, two-burner stove were on the table beside her. Nearby was “Discovery of India,” the late Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s story of Mohandas K. Gandhi and nonviolent non-cooperation as a means of change.

Johnson-Sirleaf said she is not sure that Gandhi’s tactics would work in Liberia.

“One needs to be free to work with opposition groups,” she said. “You can’t do much from jail.”

Ellen Johnson was born in Liberia, attended private schools here, and after high school married James Sirleaf, who had just graduated from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. She went to work as a bookkeeper for a small local firm. The couple had four children.

A few years later she and her husband went to the University of Wisconsin. When they returned to Liberia, Ellen became an accountant in the Ministry of Finance. Their marriage broke up in 1969.

“I spent all of my time working after college, usually 18 hours a day. I felt I had to catch up with all my classmates from high school,” she said.

She went to Harvard on a U.S. scholarship that year and came back as assistant minister of finance. She resigned three years later, went to the World Bank in Washington and returned to Liberia in 1977.

Appointed by Tolbert

In August, 1979, President Tolbert appointed her finance minister. She was a renegade, however, and frequently criticized the government. As it turned out, that may have saved her life.

After Doe took power in April, 1980, assassinating Tolbert and executing 13 government leaders, including six Cabinet ministers and the chief justice, he summoned Johnson-Sirleaf to his office. With her was a politician friend from her days in America, G. Baccus Matthews, who had been imprisoned by Tolbert and freed by Doe.

“You remember her,” Matthews said. “She is a friend of the revolution.”

Johnson-Sirleaf was spared and, in fact, stayed on to help ease in Doe’s new finance minister. After a few months, however, it became apparent that Doe was thinking of becoming more than just a transitional leader. She, and later Matthews, who was foreign minister, left the government.

Matthews’ opposition party, the United People’s Party, was banned from the election last year. He has just returned to Liberia after nearly 10 months in the United States.

Now he and Johnson-Sirleaf have emerged as leaders of the political opposition here, each representing different factions.

Johnson-Sirleaf’s ties to the West and her experience in fiscal affairs would make her an ideal president, political analysts say. But no one knows whether she has grass-roots political support comparable to that of Matthews.

“She’s become a popular hero for not being willing to say she was sorry or grateful for being let out, like government wanted her to,” one political observer said. “But she’s made enemies as well as friends. She’s personally ambitious and not afraid to use her elbows in a political fight.”

Johnson-Sirleaf, for example, says Matthews is “a spoiler” for stirring up the political waters by suggesting that the opposition has failed and should try to work with Doe.

Matthews says he is simply being pragmatic.

“We all know the limitations of this place,” Matthews said. “But to achieve something here, people have to stop trying to fight Mr. Doe. It’s not going to help if he gets the impression he’s being permanently assailed.”

As for Johnson-Sirleaf’s political future, Matthews warns of hidden obstacles for a woman--”like the fundamentally patriarchal nature of African societies.”

Liberia may be a long way from such questions. Doe has more than five years remaining in his term. And politics remains an uncertain business here.

Johnson-Sirleaf entered a downtown Monrovia restaurant on a recent Saturday night to attend the engagement party of a friend. She asked visiting reporters at the table if their stories on Liberia had been published yet in the United States.

“When they run,” she said, “will we have to run?” Then she laughed.