There are countries where the past is not past. It lies in potholes, in radio broadcasts, and in the price of rice. Liberia in 2005 was such a country. The war had ended. The memory had not.
And then, a woman stood to speak. She did not raise her voice. She did not call for revenge. She spoke of renewal—not the kind promised on posters, but the harder kind that begins with clearing rubble and returning ledgers.
“Today, we wholeheartedly embrace this change. We recognise that this change is not change for change’s sake but a fundamental break with the past ...”
She was 67 years old. Her name was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and she had come by her presidency not through a dynasty nor through glamour, but through attrition and work. In a country accustomed to strongmen, she appeared as a woman in a plain suit, an economist by training, shaped not by ideology but by institution.
She was born in 1938 in Monrovia, in a house that belonged to no single class. Her mother, Marketta, had been adopted into an Americo-Liberian family, descendants of freed Black Americans who had colonised the country. Her father, Jahmale, was the first indigenous Liberian to be elected to the national legislature.
It meant that from early on, Sirleaf understood the quiet humiliations of caste. She knew how language worked in rooms and how power moved through families. And she knew early, too, the uses of education as an escape. At 17, she married James Sirleaf and followed him to America. It was there that the girl from Monrovia began her second life—as a woman who would choose work over marriage, books over belonging.
In Wisconsin, she studied accounting. In Colorado, economics at Harvard, in public administration. She devoured the lives of thinkers and technocrats—John Maynard Keynes, Amartya Sen, and the economist Gunnar Myrdal. Her interests were not theoretical. She wanted to know what built a state—and what destroyed one.
She worked for the Treasury in Liberia and later became Minister of Finance under president Tolbert in the 1970s. She tried to reform salaries and crack down on corruption. It made her enemies. In 1980, Tolbert was executed in a coup. Sirleaf fled. It would be the first of many exiles.
From Nairobi to New York, she worked for the World Bank, the UN, and Citibank. She learnt how capital moved across borders. She watched African leaders sell their countries for donor money. She also saw what institutions could do if they were not hollowed out.
“We pledge anew our commitment to transparency, open government, and participatory democracy for all of our citizens ...”
She came back in the 1990s to a Liberia in tatters. Charles Taylor, a former warlord, was president. Sirleaf opposed him. She ran for office. She was jailed. Released. Jailed again.
The Second Civil War ended in 2003. She was 65. Most would have retired. She campaigned instead. She won. On January 16, 2006, she stood before a country that had seen 250,000 deaths. The power grid was gone. Roads were mined. Budgets were fiction.
She began with debt relief, renegotiating billions. She restored electricity to parts of Monrovia. She appointed women to top posts.
In the wreckage of Liberia’s long civil war, with 250,000 dead and institutions in tatters, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf stood before her people and asked for a moment of silence—not for applause, not for triumph, but for the dead.
Then she spoke—not like a politician, but like a witness. She evoked her illiterate grandmothers, the terror of exile, the hunger of children, and the debt of survival. Her voice was steady, dry, and unflinching.
Her 2006 inaugural address remains one of the most quietly radical documents of post-conflict leadership—a woman’s account not just of returning home but of choosing to repair it. There was no grandiosity, only the audacity to begin again. These 500 words capture its ethical force.
Excerpt from president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Inaugural Address, January 16, 2006—Monrovia, Liberia
“Let us first praise Almighty God, the Arbiter of all affairs of humankind, whose omnipotent hand guides and steers our nation.
Before I begin this address, which signifies the high noon of this historic occasion, I ask that we bow our heads for a moment of silent prayer in memory of the thousands of our compatriots who have died as a result of years of conflict.
I also ask your indulgence as I reflect on the memory of my two rural illiterate grandmothers and my mother and father, who taught me to be what I am today, and the families who took them in and gave them the opportunity of a better life.
Vice President Joseph Boakai and I have just participated in the time-honoured constitutional ritual of oath-taking … It affirms the culmination of a commitment to our nation’s collective search for a purposeful and responsive national leadership.
We applaud the resilience of our people who, weighed down and dehumanised by poverty and rendered immobile by the shackles of fourteen years of civil war, courageously went to the polls … We pledge to live up to your expectations of creating a government that is attentive and responsive to your needs, concerns, and the development and progress of our country.
We know that your vote was a vote for change; a vote for peace, security and stability; a vote for individual and national prosperity; a vote for healing and leadership. We have heard you loud and clear, and we humbly accept your mandate.
We recognise that this change is not just for the sake of change but a fundamental break with the past … requiring bold and decisive steps to address the problems that for decades have stunted our progress.
No one who has lived in or visited this country in the past fifteen years will deny the physical destruction and moral decadence the civil war has left in its wake. We are a strong and resilient people, capable of rising from the ashes of civil strife and starting anew.
I know of this struggle because I have been a part of it. Without bitterness, anger, or vindictiveness, I recall the inhumanity of confinement, the terror of attempted rape, and the ostracism of exile.”
—End of excerpt—
She left office in 2018. Her critics, and she had many, accused her of favouring the elite. Her supporters pointed to what she did with a ruined country: restored solvency, established civil service exams, and protected a press that often mocked her. She did not chase popularity. She chased stability.
She left no dynasty. No cult. Not even a party to inherit her name. She left documents. Memos. Budgets. Institutions that worked slightly better than when she found them.
“This occasion, held under the cloudy skies, marks a celebration of change ... a national renewal.”
In retirement, she published her memoir. It was spare. Almost procedural. There were no flourishes. She wanted to be read as a president, not a personality.
She read novels. She quoted Achebe, sometimes Baldwin. But mostly, she read reports—on poverty, women’s participation in agriculture, and on corruption indexes. When asked how she survived prison, she said, “I focused on what I would do when I got out.”
In a world of spectacle, she kept her power quiet, dry, and efficient. Liberia still struggles. But under Sirleaf, it did not return to war.
That is not glamour. That is governance.
Ira Mathur is a journalist at Guardian Media and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir Love The Dark Days.
Website: www.irasroom.org.
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