Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was president of Liberia from 2006 to 2018, the first woman elected head of state in Africa. She was the Harvard-trained economist and former finance minister who won the run-off of November 2005 against the footballer Weah, two years after Taylor went into exile and the civil wars ended. She governed twelve years of a country with no electricity, no water, no roads, a fifteen thousand strong UN force, and a debt of four and a half billion dollars. The debt was cancelled in 2010, four fifths of it, after she had gone through the IMF programme that the cancellation required. The Firestone and ArcelorMittal concessions were renegotiated. The army was rebuilt from nothing by the Americans. The truth and reconciliation commission she had set up recommended in 2009 that she be barred from office for thirty years for having given Taylor money in 1990, which she admitted and which the legislature ignored. The Ebola epidemic of 2014 and 2015 killed nearly five thousand Liberians, closed the borders. It was met with a quarantine of the West Point slum enforced by soldiers who shot a boy, which she apologised for. She won the Nobel peace prize in 2011. It was a month before the election in which she was re-elected after Tubman's grandson boycotted the run-off. She handed over to Weah in January 2018, the first transfer between elected presidents since 1944. She was born in Monrovia, the daughter of the first native Liberian in the legislature. She married at seventeen, left the husband who beat her, and studied at Wisconsin and Harvard. She was finance minister under Tolbert in 1979. She fled the Doe coup, came back to stand against Doe in 1985 and was jailed twice. She worked for the World Bank, Citibank and the UN Development Programme. She backed Taylor's rebellion at first and then ran against him in 1997 and lost. She is the grandmother the country called Ma Ellen. Her sons held the central bank and the security service, which the country noticed. The corruption she had promised to end was, at the end, the thing she was criticised for.
- Lived: 1938 CE – ?
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: president, economist, politician
