Rebuilding the Economy

What do you do with all the competing demands that you face, when running an economy with a monoculture? How do you lead it? How do you lead any economy that structurally deficient into a diversification path? How do you deal with an economy that doesn't have the base, for its own currency and its own resources even though nationally well endowed?

· Sirleaf inherited a devastated country which in the past three decades was underdeveloped, but at the start of her Presidency the economy was totally wiped out. The economy had totally collapsed with the largest decline in history, there was no infrastructure, no functioning institution.

· There was also a dearth of human capital because many of the citizens had gone into exile. There were two large splits in the population, those who had left different rural areas and come to the city for safety during the conflict and those seeking opportunities out of the country. Some of them were in neighboring countries, in refugee camps. Liberians scattered all over the world because of this, many went out in search of employment elsewhere. Many were moving across borders as much they could. Many of them were subjected to serious ill treatment. They were jailed in many places because they had no employment, no skills as asylum seekers, no knowledge of the foreign languages, but they just kept traveling from place to place wherever they could seek refuge, wherever they could find sustenance.

· That's the Liberia she inherited locally. Many people who had stayed were very courageous people who fought, particularly women. And women who were the victims of the war. Many of them were unfortunately raped, because rape become a weapon of war. And that's how it became ingrained into the society and remains a problem that she face even today.

· Sirleaf had been in politics for quite some time, and so she could not stand by ignorance of the country. She had monitored the country over the years. Even when she was in exile, Sirleaf had kept up to date with current affairs. So, Sirleaf knew what she was facing. Sirleaf also while abroad begun to hold consultations, with the external supporters. She knew it was important to start to put in place some technical assistance, because she first had to focus on growth.

· Short-term vision: Growth, was key to start the process of the means to deliver services to the people. Rebuilding the economy was concurrently important to ensure security for quick maintenance of peace or say consolidation of peace. The Accra Peace Accord had disbanded the army or dissolved the army. The UN peacekeepers were there. The peacekeeper had come in-large numbers of people. She and her government had to make sure the rules of engagement of the peacekeepers were very clear. She established a defense pack with the US government for the building of a new army. So, that meant go into the process of changing the qualification to be there because she wanted to have a professional army.

· Long-term vision: In-terms of growth, the country had for a long time had a serious structural deficiency, because it had depended for many years on two major exports-Iron Ore and rubber, which over in the early days of a nation building the prices of those exports were high. However, this took away the attention on diversification.

· Growth was important. So, she had to get those operations reactivated and going and to begin to find a means to support the rebuilding of the country. At the same time, she wanted to build a long-term vision in consultation with the people, which meant it was a longer process, because that means being able to put in place physical stations, in three different counties. Building a consensus around the vision was important because she had a long period of people not having the freedoms to participate, and if she are going to really change, she had to tackle some of those longstanding practices and culture, and so one of them was to involve the people as much as possible.

· Short-term growth:But at the same time she had a shorter-term development agenda and that was looking at the constraints to growth which were a very limited revenue base and fiscal space. Fiscal space because the country had to run into a serious debt overhang problem. And to open the fiscal space she had to make some swift decisions and take actions. So immediately she got into the HIPEC program, as a poverty reduction strategy. Her government assessed the situation of the debt both local and external debt and identified the categories of creditors and started the process on HIPEC and also the process to negotiate.

· Quick wins: She also worked on some quick wins which included a few streetlights. This gave people a flicker of hope. Many had never seen grid lights. They had heard generators, making noise behind high fences for a long time, but they many had not seen lights in the streets. Knowing that it would take a long time to actually get a significant percentage of population of access, electricity because all the wires and the poles, the hydroelectric plant, all were destroyed. So, she knew it would take time. Therefore she started with those street lights, and then she started to bring some thermal units in.

· Transparency and Setting Expectations: We knew, it is going to take us a couple of years or more to get the hydro reconstructed, but she got thermal units to start getting lights and then to encourage the people she started with a slogan, small light today, big light tomorrow. Again, that was a means of engaging the public to understand the constraints that she faced. In all of her statements, Sirleaf kept seeing there's no quick fix. She was very honest with the people, that development will take hard work; this will take the support and the collaboration of all the citizens. In speeches she managed expectations but being upfront that don't have a magic button.

New government offices that President Sirleaf built with funding from the Chinese government

· Challenges:She had focused on growth and reached a peak of 9.5%. This was the end of 2012. We had also started the processes diversification but there were also constraints there. Land is always a challenge and she had not done land reform. The investors that came required large pieces land, to start agricultural operations but land was one of the most valued assets by rural people. Rural people put emphasis on owning land because that is the only thing they had. One of the major learning lessons, for President Sirleaf is that she should have consulted people before she made concessions agreements with investors to provide large tracks of land. So, when the investors came and started to clear the land and start operations people rebelled. So, consultation with people was an essential element?

· To manage the land conflicts, Sirleaf visited some of the places where the citizens had problem and try to explain the process of development, and try to explain to them that the land will never produce income or job for you until you put it to use. But ownership is a problem.

· But growth took place and she tried to move at a fast pace. China came in, traditional investors came in and our own ability to get support from non-traditional sources. We tapped into foundations and philanthropic entities to establish specialized programs for vulnerable groups, women, youth and then she had to institutionalized them.

· Building Teams: To rebuild institutions, she had to put in all the statues, the programs, the policies for the rebuilding of institutions and of all of this, she had to have a team that had the requisite skills, education, technical skills, particularly those who were able to implement the long-term vision that she put together after many years of consultation with people.

· Youthful teams: Sirleaf put emphasis on young people for the teams Sirleaf built because they did not have the culture of the past, with the culture of dishonesty and dependency which had characterized many of the old order. Many young people saw themselves as a team that their success represented the success of those in their area of responsibility. They had access to open cabinet meetings in which they had full freedom to differ, to question to criticize, but Sirleaf permitted this without giving up my authority. So, when the time came to make a hard decision because they were too much dissent or too much confusion, Sirleaf made those decisions. So, but it worked well, and she got the record that she wanted.

· Debt: The debt crisis was a major constraint on being able to access resources. Some institutions such as World Bank, had institutional policies that you could not access programs unless the debt was settled. So, she had an arrangement of holding bilateral discussions to get debt to be forgiven through political action and political decisions on the basis of the authority of the country either through the executive or parliament.

· So, using bilateral discussions and waiver of debt to be able to negotiate with the multinationals and using some of their own support to cancel the multinational debt. With debt cancellation this would allow us to open the space to now access, World Bank loans and IMF balance of payments support. However, the basic problem there was the multiplicity of the institutions, because they all had different policies, different priorities, different conditions.

· Lack of coordination: Another major challenge was that with opening of space for new programs and aid led an influx of do-gooders that were not coordinated. In a country that is coming out of civil war and with the first female elect head of state it attracted a lot of international NGOs which sometimes can see slow progress because they of lack of coordination and accountability. Many organizations, it was unclear what their sources of funding were and getting all of them registered was a tasking process. At the same time, Sirleaf was faced with the urgency of moving her agenda forward of progress and growth and so she became tolerant of regulating them. When it came of the land rights for example, many NGO’s were going into communities telling people about their rights to land, which was a good thing, but it also undermined some of the process that she had put in place to negotiate with people. Also, many NGO’s went along to build schools without the governments input and when it came to run them, there were not teachers and the schools were left as white elephants.