Date: 2024-10-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00024760
LIBERIA
PRESIDENT SAMUAL DOE
25 years after his demise, Samuel Doe continues to cast a long shadow across Liberian politics
PRESIDENT SAMUAL DOE
25 years after his demise, Samuel Doe continues to cast a long shadow across Liberian politics
Former President Samuel K. Doe, holding a walkie-talkie, after the 1980 coup that toppled President William Tolbert Jr. Photograph by Sando Moore/AP.
Original article: https://africanarguments.org/2015/09/25-years-after-his-demise-samuel-doe-continues-to-cast-a-long-shadow-across-liberian-politics/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This article reminds me of the period when the company where I was the CFO operated in Liberia. The company was Continental Seafoods (CSF) of Secaucus, New Jersey, a subsidiary of Ward Foods. CSF operated over 100 shrimp trawlers around the world with a fleet of around 20 based in Monrovia, Liberia. I visited our Liberia operation several times a year during the 1970s until I left the company in 1978.
The CSF operation in Liberia was operated in collaboration with the Mesurado Organization that owned several commercial companies including a shrimp fishing company, cold stores and shrim processing plant, several agricultural operations, a Caterpillar equipment franchise, and much more. Mesurado was owned by Stephen Tolbert, who was also Minister of Finance and President William Tolbert's brother!.
Stephen Tolbert died in an air crash that was never fully explained around 1987. The Mesurado Organization continued to operate with its expatriate management in place until the Doe coup of 1980. Many of the expatriates fled the country at the time of the coup, many in small boats and were subsequently rescued at sea.
During my time with CSF. I met with and worked with Ellen Sirleaf Johnson who was at the Liberian Treasury in the Tolbert Government. She was badly treated but eventually escaped the country and made a new career for herself ... the Equator Bank, later CitiBank, and then at UNDP where she headed up the Africa Division, and then eventually back to Liberia and elected President.
Early in the Doe presidency, I worked with Carmena Tolbert Doe, the widow of Stephen Tolbert and 50% owner of the Mesurado Organization to assess the feasability of rehabilitating the companies for her benefit. The deceased President Tolbert had owned the other 50% of the Mesurado Group. I did this work in collaboration with the IFC (The International Finance Corporation, a unit of the World Bank Group in Washington, DC that specialized in private sector financing). I knew quite a lot about the Mesurado Group, which had become an impressive organization while it was owned by the Tolbert family and management by international experts. In the few months post coup ... that is the Doe coup ... a massive amount of the company's functionality was detroyed with anything moveable taken away ... nothing was left except empty shells of buildings where anything of value was long gone. There was nobody in the new Doe Government that had any competence whatsoever, and the 'share ownership' was something of zero value to either Carmena or the Government.
It was challenging to make the case with the World Bank ... actually IFC ... that our team was recommending that there should be no project to resuscitate the Mesurado Group. I was under intense pressure to propose a project, which in my team's view would have been pure madness. I think this was the last time I did work for IFC, and I am sure there was a connection. Someone was mad at me, most likely because the project we were looking into was already programmed into the IFC's projections. Around this time, the World Bank was still lending money to Liberia ... but not too long after my own saga, the World Bank terminated its Liberia lending program.
I returned to Liberia several times post CSF doing other assignments for the UN and the World Bank.
Peter Burgess
BY BROOKS MARMON
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015 (Accessed June 2023)
When a 28-year-old Master Sergeant took power in 1980, he set in motion a series of events that reverberates in Liberia to this day.
In 1980, Samuel K. Doe, a 28 year-old Master Sergeant, assumed power in Liberia in a blaze of glory. In a surprise night-time attack on the Executive Mansion overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Doe and his accomplices brutally murdered President William R. Tolbert Jr, ending 133 years of rule by black American settlers and their descendants (known as Americo-Liberians). Having discarded with Tolbert, Doe became Liberia’s first president of “exclusive indigenous heritage”.
In the subsequent decade, President Doe inflamed ethnic politics and eked out a suspiciously close victory in the 1985 elections, before he met an even less dignified end than his predecessor. At the end of the Cold War, his previously unwavering support from the US evaporated and, as Liberia erupted into civil war, Doe was left vulnerable. Nine months into the conflict on 9 September, 1990, Doe was captured on a visit to the recently deployed ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in Monrovia.
Hours later, he was dead, though Liberia’s civil war would continue for another 13 long years. In his last hours, Doe was stripped to his underwear, interrogated on film, and his ear was sliced off. Rebel leader Prince Johnson nonchalantly presided over the affair.
Today, exactly 25 years after Samuel Doe’s bloody death, his legacy continues to reverberate in Liberia. Prince Johnson, for instance, is today a Liberian Senator, while a range of actors tied to Doe’s overthrow, including current President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, remain prominent in politics.
Although he has been gone for a quarter of a century, Doe set in motion a chain of events that continue to make their impact felt across the nation he once led.
A tenuous reign
Doe came to power in 1980 by virtue of being the highest-ranking of the coup members and began his reign in brutal fashion. Ten days after President Tolbert met his brutal end, thirteen of the most senior officials of the Tolbert government were stripped down to their underwear and publicly executed on a Monrovia beach.
Doe’s new government briefly flirted with Libya, before aligning firmly with the US. This position was rewarded with massive foreign assistance from the administration of President Ronald Reagan and a state visit to the White House in 1982. Furthermore, until 1985, Liberia was the largest per capita recipient of US aid in sub-Saharan Africa, receiving more assistance from the US in 1981-1985 than over the entire previous century – though by the time rebels Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson moved to overthrow Doe at the twilight of the Cold War, this support had evaporated.
Before that, however, Doe won fraudulent elections in October 1985 and then, just a month later, faced a major coup attempt led by a former comrade. Doe survived the failed overthrow, but this tumultuous period caused domestic political calculations to change greatly. The army quelled an uprising soon after and proceeded to launch reprisals and perpetrate human rights violations against the Gio ethnic group, which was seen as widely supporting the coup. By 1990, forces under Doe were committing ever greater atrocities and primarily consisted of members of his own Krahn ethnic group.
Doe’s decade-long rule is often remembered for these atrocities, but he also has some defenders. For instance, William K. Glay, Sr. a Liberian politician who was a cousin and former advisor to President Doe, claims that many of the most egregious atrocities under Doe’s watch, such as a massacre at a Monrovia church, were perpetrated by undisciplined commanders.
In fact, Glay lauds his kinsman for constructing roads, a new national archives, military barracks, sports stadiums, and police stations during his presidency. He told African Arguments that one of Doe’s greatest achievements was the construction of a range of government ministries – prior to Doe’s presidency, most government ministries were housed in buildings leased out by well-connected Americo-Liberians.
However, while many Liberians recognise the infrastructural achievements of the Doe government – most of which were laid to waste by the civil war – many blame him for introducing ethnic politics into the country’s governance, the consequences of which still linger today.
25 years after his demise, Doe’s party, the National Democratic Party of Liberia (NDPL), is no longer a major political force. It did elect two senators in the first post-war election in 2005, and its presidential candidate, Winston Tubman, placed fourth in a large field. But the party was deregistered in May 2014 and according to Tubman, “the reason I didn’t do better [in the 2005 elections] was because of the stigma the NDPL carried”. He adds that NDPL sympathisers today are dominated by the Krahn.
A lasting imprint
Looking back on Doe’s rule today, not all Liberians see the man himself with malice. In fact, even Winston A. Tolbert, the son of the president that Doe deposed, says that “in [our] family we don’t hold anything against Doe or his family…[Doe] was just a pawn in a big game…he was just executing a plan that someone gave him.”
Tolbert suspects that both his father and Doe were the targets in this “˜big game’, removed from office as a result of pressures from the US government.
Youth such as Sally Gaye, the Public Relations Officer of the Grand Gedeh University Student Union and an ethnic Krahn, continue to hold Doe in high regard. She refers to the former president as “one of the best leaders”, adding that “Those that have degrees [the two leading candidates in the last presidential election both held degrees from Harvard University] are not even half as good.”
Nevertheless, Doe’s time in office is more commonly seen as a dark period in Liberia’s history, and his ten years at the helm as well as the civil war that began under his reign continue to cast a long shadow on events in Liberia today. The country appears unable to develop new leadership untainted by the war and as Jeremy Swen, a youth activist, notes, “there was nepotism, corruption in the Doe government and it still continues in today’s government.”
Several destabilising factors are presently converging. The UN Mission in Liberia is expected to transition full security responsibilities to the government next year, while in 2017, President Sirleaf is constitutionally required to step aside for her successor.
Elwood Dunn, a Tolbert minister and leading Liberian scholar, notes that despite Sirleaf’s recent attempts to go “to great lengths to spell out her own ethnic identity, distancing herself in the process from her settler-Liberian benefactors”, Doe remains Liberia’s only president of “exclusive indigenous heritage”.
It is likely that Sirleaf’s legacy as Africa’s best known female head of state will be greatly shaped by the extent to which she can extricate herself from her support of the movement that sought to overthrow Doe. In 2009, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recommended that President Sirleaf be banned from holding political office for 30 years. This recommendation, and many others, have gone unfulfilled – Dunn notes that Sirleaf “may leave the TRC report as a headache for her successor” adding that “she may view her role in Doe’s overthrow as a necessary one.”
Gaye and other Liberians believe that upon her retirement, Sirleaf will not be able to stay in Liberia due to her lack of popularity. But as President Sirleaf and the Liberian people consider the future, their thoughts will return to the past and the events of a quarter century ago that will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the political calculations and emotions of the present. 25 years on, Doe’s presence is still felt in Liberia’s corridors of power.
Brooks Marmon lives in Monrovia where he supports programmes to build accountability and transparency in Liberia for the Accountability Lab. He tweets at @AfricaInDC.