DEVELOPMENT: Liberia Slowly Begins to Pick Up the Pieces

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jeff Cooper

ACCRA, May 3 1998 (IPS) - The Liberian government of President Charles Taylor, now almost 10 months in power, is under no illusions about the daunting post-war needs and challenges facing the West African country.

In fact, government officials have been very candid with donors. At the April meeting with the Paris Club, Foreign Minister Monnie Captan, said: “Liberia is in a predicament. Our government is not in the position to provide the required resources for the implementation of the post-war reconstruction and development programmes”.

The donors pledged 220 million U.S. Dollars for the reconstruction programme at the April meeting, but this is just a drop in the bucket of what the country needs to pull itself out of poverty and near total collapse of all services.

More than 80 percent of Monrovia, the capital city, remains without electricity and running water. These facilities were almost completely destroyed during the war. All of the country’s 15 hospitals, 27 clinics and 193 health centres are in ruins.

Of the country’s 7,770 kilometres of public roads, far less than 20 percent are paved, and telecommunications services in all of the country’s 13 counties and their provisional capitals, remain non-existent.

“How do we mine our iron ore without rail access to ports, or conveyor belts to transfer iron ore from train cars to bulk carrier vessels. How do we run factories without power and water supply, how do we grow food without essential tools, fertiliser and seeds?”, Foreign Minister Captan asked the donors in Paris.

“How do we increase the productive capacity of our economy without basic infrastructure? We must be helped to a stage where expectations can viably be fulfilled,” he continued.

Taylor, a former warlord who was elected President last July, has repeatedly called on Liberians to tighten their belts and get involved in various forms of national initiatives that will lessen government’s burden.

“Liberia’s present priorities are dazzling and dynamic. It will require not only a facilitative legislative agenda, but an empowering national will,” Taylor told the people earlier this year.

When Taylor took office, after leading a war which began in 1989 and lasted for seven years, he inherited a bankrupt treasury. In January, however, Taylor told the nation that due to stringent financial discipline, the economy was recovering.

As evidence of this, he cited the fact that domestic revenue had increased from 155.3 million Liberian Dollars for the first seven months of 1997 to 292.2 million Liberian Dollars for the first five months of his government. (One U.S. Dollar is equivalent to 40 Liberian Dollars).

According to Taylor, there also had been a phenomenal growth in external trade during the same period — imports at 213 million U.S. Dollars were up by 153 percent and exports at 25.3 million U.S. Dollars were up by 158 percent.

But these impressive statistics have not translated into a change for the average Liberian. Prices of basic commodities, mostly imported, keep rising. For example, a 100 pound bag of rice, Liberia’s staple food, sells for between 1000 to 1300 Liberian dollars, compared to the pre-war price of 25 Liberian Dollars. A price for a bag of rice represents far more than the salary of any full time minister.

Seven years of war also have halted all agricultural and other income generating activities throughout the country. Even after months of relative peace, doubts about safety in the rural areas still remain. There also is an acute shortage of farming implements for the few rural dwellers that are gradually returning to their villages and towns.

Early this year, the Internal Affairs Ministry said that there were over 4000 traditional rulers, mostly farmers, stranded in Monrovia. The ministry has since succeeded in sending quite a number of these stranded farmers back to their various towns. About 75 percent of Liberia’s pre-war population was involved in small-scale agriculture.

Liberia’s main foreign exchange earner, iron ore, which accounted for 70 percent of the country’s total foreign exchange earnings, was hit hard during the war.

The Liberian American Company (LAMCO), a joint venture ore concession, ceased operation in 1989, six months before the war and after the Liberian government took complete management of the company, while the Bong Mining Company (BMC), a German company which accounted for 29 percent of the country’s ore production, was closed because of the war. About 15,000 Liberians are now jobless, due to the closure of the two companies.

Liberia’s Minister for Lands, Mine and Energy, Jenkins Dunbar, told journalists earlier this year that all Bong Mining Company’s assets, valued at one billion U.S. Dollars, were destroyed or looted during the war.

Minister Dunbar said BMC has informed the government that it will not come back. LAMCO also lost 320 million U.S. Dollars worth of its equipment, according to Minister Dunbar.

The country’s biggest single cash crop, rubber has not fully recovered from the effects of the war. With a million acres of land granted in 1926, Firestone Rubber Plantation, the world largest rubber plantation, still has about 80 percent of its 4000 work force unaccounted for or scattered as refugees.