Liberia’s Sirleaf: Africa’s first elected female leader

– Backing Charles Taylor –

Turning around Africa’s oldest independent state — first founded for freed US slaves — where institutions had become rotten to the core, was never going to be easy.

Attitudes cooled to Sirleaf at home when a 2009 Truth and Reconciliation Commission named her on a list of people who should not hold public office for 30 years for backing warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor.

Sirleaf admitted to initially backing Taylor’s insurgency against Samuel Doe’s government in 1989 which led to the country’s first civil war, but became a fierce opponent as the true extent of his war crimes became apparent.

She calmly deflected the myriad criticisms against her, returning time and again to the need to reconcile and move forward.

– ‘Born to rule’ –

Re-elected in 2011, Sirleaf oversaw a country that slipped into recession under the impact of an Ebola outbreak, virtually shutting down businesses, and the collapse in commodity prices.

“The last five years of Ellen’s regime were marked by a flood of people coming from the diaspora to get jobs while locally qualified people” were overlooked, Nimely told AFP.

Born Ellen Euphemia Johnson on October 29, 1938, in the capital Monrovia, she wrote in her memoirs that an old man predicted days after her birth that she would grow up to rule.

The sprightly grandmother, who is equally at ease in flowing robes and headdresses while charming financial institutions, and in a comfortable pair of jeans and a cap on the streets of Liberia, married at age 17, but later divorced after the relationship turned abusive.

She has four sons and 11 grandchildren