Liberia looks to loans to satisfy voters’ wishes

AFTER stoking expectations among Liberia’s voters for rolling back poverty, President George Weah is facing the twin pressures of time and money to carry out his promises.

On January 22, Weah became president of the one of the world’s poorest countries after vowing to improve the daily life of a population desperate for electricity, running water and other basics.

The former soccer star succeeded Africa’s first elected woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who restored stability after brutal civil wars but failed to raise living standards.

“It is time now to consolidate the peace and to develop the country to be economically independent,” Liezelle Kumalo, a researcher at the South African think-tank the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), told a seminar in Monrovia last month.

She suggested Weah should not only keep the gains of Sirleaf’s term in office, but see them “multiplied at high speed” to meet the expectations of young people who massively backed him at the polls.

Weah himself seems clearly aware of the burden of expectation. He sought to set an example at the start of his mandate by cutting his own salary by 25%. Then he ordered a 20% cut in the price of rice.

During the recent signing of an accord with the African Governance Initiative (AGI), founded by British former prime minister Tony Blair, Weah stressed the need for “achievable programmes and projects in the next two years for the people, if the government is to make impressive marks in six years” – the length of his presidential term.

Desperately strapped for cash at home, Weah has turned to funding from abroad to help.

In a trip to Brussels last week, he was promised à27-million (R415.8-million) in aid from the European Commission.

The government has also taken out massive loans for building roads and bridges, respectively from a group in Singapore and a public works firm in Burkina Faso.

Both loans are mountainous by the size of Liberia’s economy – and some media commentators have said the country could be saddling itself with an unsustainable burden. —