Soft interventionism in Liberia

...In September 2005, the transitional government signed an agreement with the international donors who have supported Liberia's recovery: GEMAP, the Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program...

...He thinks the lack of public debate around GEMAP poses an unnecessary obstacle to its success: "There was already sufficient public support" for an anticorruption program of this scale...

...Such a site could offer access not only to the text of the agreement and relevant meeting dates but also to the European Union and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) audits, the curriculum vitae of the internationally recruited experts, and eventually the budgets of the SOEs...

...An attempt by Liberia to secure a loan in 1921 brought the most invasive proposal yet, but the U.S...

...These days, we can use all the encouragement we can get...

...Progress on this front is crucial, as Liberia has only until December 2006 to be judged eligible for relief under the Enhanced HIPC initiative (a PRSP being one of the major criteria...

...Whether such provisions are made will be crucial to GEMAP's success at incubating a culture of sustainable economic governance...

...The twenty-million-dollar question for the EGSC is, what happens when one of the experts refuses to sign off on the budget he oversees...

...More recently, the Reagan administration decided to try its hand with the OPEX (OPerational EXperts) program, which saw the Doe regime make fools of the "18 wise men" appointed to oversee the country's finances...

...Although the World Bank's Web site includes a brief page devoted to GEMAP, in a country where most of the citizenry lacks Internet access, this doesn't solve the problem...

...To the applause of international watchdogs like Global Witness, the new president "rendered null and void" all previously existing forestry concessions...

...With the internationally recruited experts exercising de facto line-item control over the budgets of the SOEs, how often the donors and the government will care to engage in this highstakes game is an open question...

...In this way, GEMAP could provide a powerful precedent for the new government to follow...

...In this regard, the GEMAP "in no manner replaces the Results-Focused Transition Framework (RFTF) as the plan for assistance in recovery and development or capacitybuilding as the preferred tool for assuring sustainable economic governance...

...In the past, the SOEs have been little more than slush funds, propping up parasitic warlords and nepotistic appointees...

...Another fear is that GEMAP could somehow serve as a Trojan horse for privatization...

...A representative for Global Witness referred to the process as "surprisingly open," and measures to ensure transparency and capacity-building are under discussion...

...to look at economic growth in this country and find ways of increasing participation of people at local levels...

...Dealing with financial questions alone is not enough...

...Measures that assuage concerns about sovereignty may hobble GEMAP as an anti-corruption measure...

...GEMAP still has a part to play in that recovery, particularly given the importance of Forestry and the Bureau of Maritime Affairs (another of the SOEs), which manages Liberia's infamous flag of convenience, which is available to anyone for a fee, as sources of revenue...

...Now it's becoming a laboratory for how far the scope extends...

...LUIGI GIOVINE is straight out of central casting...

...Last year the transitional government operated on a budget of roughly $80 million...

...New loans were taken out to pay the old ones...

...NICHOLAS JAHR is a freelance writer who served as a Long-Term Observer for the Carter Center during the recent Liberian elections...

...He's impeccably dressed, rarely in anything other than a suit and aviator sunglasses, never less or more than two weeks growth of beard...

...But neither the RFTF nor the GEMAP contains much in the way of hard benchmarks or goals...

...You can not have a majority vote on a committee that has a head of state," Giovine grants...

...Sold as an anti-corruption measure, it has been decried by a few Liberians as little more than neocolonialism...

...In the early sixties the International Monetary Fund stepped in with a program that Tarr describes as the prototype of the structural adjustment programs now dreaded around the world...

...Capacity-building" is also critical...

...After a major loan from the British government in 1871, the president who negotiated it lay deposed and dead under mysterious circumstances...

...There was no algorithm for this," Giovine says, by way of explaining the single seat on the committee allotted for a representative of Liberian civil society...

...reconstructing their accounts has often proved impossible, and allegations of corruption have been leveled at management past and present...

...Instead, Pajibo's concerns are with the manner in which GEMAP was developed and negotiated...

...Furthermore, the management contracts offered for the SOEs will almost certainly not be coterminous with GEMAP, as this would drastically limit the profit incentive required to attract bids...

...The lack of public awareness is compounded by the calculated vagueness of the 26 DISSENT / Summer 2006 GEMAP text and the dearth of information available to civil society...

...Through it all, Liberia's debt continued to mount...

...Congress shot it down...

...Finally, the soliciting of the management contracts offers an opportunity to model transparency for the new government, with the introduction of Transparency International's Integrity Pacts or similar arrangements...

...Complemented by Sirleaf's support for elections of county superintendents (previously presidential appointees), this could represent the beginnings of a substantive devolution of power...

...The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) has presided over the disarmament of more than 100,000 ex-combatants from all sides of the country's prolonged, brutal conflict, and it provided crucial logistical assistance in the recent election—all this on a budget of just over $2 million per day, a fraction of what the United States has handed to Halliburton in Iraq...

...So the EGSC will settle any dispute by consensus, with the president preserving ultimate authority...

...If anything, the foreign agents introduced as part of these loan arrangements had even greater powers than the internationally recruited experts under GEMAP...

...GEMAP's proponents have declared their willingness to make use of the Monrovia newspapers and countrywide radio broadcasts, but months after its passage, mention of GEMAP still drew blank stares from Liberian NGO workers outside the capital as well as from roomfuls of local chiefs...

...So far, GEMAP seems a positive contribution to that effort...

...With most of the internationally recruited experts now in place (at least one of whom is, in fact, Liberian) and the escrow accounts nearly ready, the system is prepared for its first real test...

...The slush is considerable...

...Weaknesses in economic governance—corruption, graft— risk undermining [its] objective . . . the preservation of peace and reconstruction...

...Then there's the fleet of Jeep Grand Cherokees bought for the transitional 24 DISSENT / Summer 2006 legislature, while a majority of the country's population lives on less than $2 a day...

...Liberia is a needed reminder of the scope of the possible...

...An audit of the Forestry Development Agency suggests that if properly run, the agency could yield revenues of up to $20 million annually (although timber exports remain under UN sanctions...

...WHY HAVE THESE efforts failed with such astonishing consistency...

...Given that the president has the power to appoint everyone from ministers to local police chiefs, Tarr sees the overwhelming concentration of power in the presidency as the crucial variable...

...Cummeh's Center for Transparency and Accountability in Liberia is part of a coalition that is struggling to monitor GEMAP's progress...

...The EGSC includes representatives of Liberia's major donors and new government in roughly equal measure...

...These negotiations offer an invaluable (if limited) opportunity for capacitybuilding, with the contracts being written to include specific benchmarks for the transfer of skill and knowledge as well as for the number of positions to be held by Liberians...

...If anything, he thinks GEMAP should go further than it does: "I think GEMAP is absolutely necessary, [but] as a stand-alone thing it's bound to fail...

...Liberians, Ezekiel Pajibo tells me, "must swallow this bitter pill...

...It cannot protect the life and property of its citizens...

...So these will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, and quite possibly outlive the agreement itself...

...Other than its extendable thirty-six-month time frame, the GEMAP text does not contain any schedule for implementation...

...At DISSENT / Summer 2006 27 the very least, the new government's compliance with GEMAP is helping to reassure the international community of its intentions...

...Under GEMAP, the Central Bank and five state-owned enterprises (SOEs)—as well as several other government institutions—will be subject to internationally recruited experts with co-signature authority over their budgets...

...There is no result...

...A former Italian paratrooper, Giovine served as a peacekeeper in Somalia, where he saw the consequences of state collapse firsthand...

...The management contracts for the SOEs have been slower to materialize...

...FA FFECTIVE DEVOLUTION remains beyond the scope of the GEMAP...

...GEMAP addresses itself explicitly to questions of financial management, but Liberia is in need of more than that and has the potential for economic development...

...it now stands at nearly $4 billion...

...those train tracks were cleared by sub-contractors for Mittal Steel, an international steel consortium that won the contract to redevelop the mines in Liberia's north only after a legally dubious intervention on his part...

...In the language so typical of UN resolutions, the Security Council's September extension of UNMIL's mandate specifically "welcomed" and "looked forward to" the implementation of GEMAP...

...Nonetheless, one of the simplest measures that could be taken to ensure transparency would be to establish a GEMAP Web site that would serve as an online clearinghouse for information...

...The agreement could expand to cover other government institutions (including ministries...

...Revenues from the SOEs will be channeled into escrow accounts to protect them from further pillage, and management contracts will be put out on the SOEs in what proponents insist will be a transparent, competitive bidding process...

...As of now," he told me this past December, "we are not even able to criticize its implementation because we don't know what's supposed to be done at what time...

...More aggressive measures could include asset disclosure (particularly for those involved in the solicitation of management contracts), the regular publication of the EGSC's bulletin in the Monrovia papers, and the introduction of a firm schedule for GEMAP's implementation...

...If GEMAP is going to make a lasting change in the way business is done in Liberia, transparency isn't enough...

...For their part, the donors and other influential members of the international community see GEMAP as the culmination of the reconstruction process and a new form of humanitarian intervention...

...The program breaks new ground in dealing with state collapse...

...Even Giovine thinks it would be a "miracle...

...But in a few weeks, workers hacked their way up and down the line, clearing the track from Sanniquellie in Liberia's north to Ganta, twenty-five miles south...

...Byron Tarr sees GEMAP in the long term...

...Any violations would be subject to penalties, which could mean banning companies from future contracts...

...GEMAP, its proponents argue, is an effort to ensure that ordinary Liberians benefit from it...

...From the last days of the True Whig Party's 130 years in power and the seemingly blissful dawn of April 12, 1980, to his time on the committee that drafted the 1985 Constitution, as finance minister in one of the transitional governments that preceded Charles Taylor's rule, and as secretary general of the Liberian Action Party (at the time a serious opposition voice), Tarr has weathered the storms that have wracked Liberia for a quarter-century...

...Bereft of data that might help predict the country's revenue-generating capacity and GEMAP's potential benefits, Cummeh argues, any effort to judge its results will be severely restricted...

...Tarr is succinct about the prospect: "That's total baloney . . . we won't do that [reach the Completion Point] even if hell freezes over...

...But the development funds could just as easily be the president's way of doing an end run around the legislature (in which her Unity Party holds a weak position) by providing money directly to local communities, and it remains to be seen how competitive local elections will be...

...In the event of recurring conflict, consensus may be just a comforting name for a game of "chicken," with the government facing down the donors, whose only leverage is to threaten to withdraw or restrict their support...

...But the League of Nations receivership never happened, and the agents served only the interests of the great powers that paid them...

...In part to allay concerns over sovereignty, GEMAP will be overseen by an Economic Governance Steering Committee (EGSC), chaired by the new president...

...Liberia could not have reached this point without the "international community...

...Pajibo is the executive director of the Center for Democratic Empowerment (CEDE), a Liberian nongovernmental organization dedicated to building "a culture of democracy" in Liberia...

...As envisioned, these require all bidders to sign an agreement pledging neither to give nor accept bribes in the bidding process and to report all financial transactions involved...

...Now he's the World Bank's Senior Country Officer, and its point man in the GEMAP negotiations...

...The opinions presented in this article are entirely his own...

...Nor has the chairman himself escaped criticism...

...the political elements of corruption need to be addressed as well...

...Although Ryan's is not the deciding voice on the issue, he claimed, "Liberia's got a chance to look at examples of economic management, and not just take a facile road . . . [but] see what's best...

...This [GEMAP] is not an economic recovery program...

...Nobody argues that the transitional government wasn't corrupt...

...Something remarkable is happening in Liberia, and the tracks are only one of the more visible signs...

...Although many Liberians think of GEMAP as a thirtysixmonth agreement, in fact the text states DISSENT / Summer 2006 25 that it "will terminate after 36 months, unless the Completion Point under the Enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative has not been reached" [emphasis added...

...28 DISSENT / Summer 2006...

...At least some of the terms of that agreement were resurrected as part of a 1926 concession that brought the Firestone Plantations Company to the country...

...Even if the program is not expanded, it's poised to have a lasting effect on how Liberia is governed...

...Jasper Cummeh agrees...

...Those words, so often a feeble abstraction, have taken on real force here, where one of the largest contingents of UN peacekeepers in the world (15,891, second only to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 17,480 watch over an area twenty times the size) have lived up to their name...

...President Sirleaf has established a Liberia Reconstruction and Development Committee to coordinate reconstruction efforts and is expected to announce progress toward an interim PRSP perhaps as early as late May...

...The Comprehensive Peace Agreement—CPA—ended the most recent round of fighting in 2003...

...At some point, vagueness becomes opacity...

...Early drafts of OPEX even included "co-signatory authority," which was struck in the late stages of negotiations in favor of the slightly more ambiguous "endorsement...

...Such a resource would help assuage Pajibo and Cummeh's shared concern for information and publicity...

...As the text itself states, "Recourse to international expertise will be an interim measure whose results can only be sustained if sufficient domestic capacity is built up concurrently...

...Pajibo provides an example: "Africa," he observes, "is among the largest consumers of condoms . . . [yet] with 85 percent unemployment, Firestone exports all the latex [produced in Liberia...

...A saga of epic venality, the story of the Jeeps dominated the headlines of the Monrovia papers for weeks as the chairman tried to prevent the members of the legislature from driving off with them as they left office...

...In a recent interview, UNMIL's deputy special representative to the secretary general, Jordan Ryan, spoke to antidemocratic fears, stating, "I don't think there's any current intention or need to expand GEMAP into new areas...

...Thus signing the GEMAP clearly fell under the rule of the transitional government as consistent with the CPA...

...By 1930 a League of Nations investigation had revealed Firestone and the Liberian government to be complicit in the use of forced labor—a development that almost put Liberia in receivership as a League of Nations mandate...

...This was the first time that Liberia's sovereignty was nearly revoked "for its own good...

...Pajibo remains unconvinced: "Where is the result in the Results-Focused Framework...

...Of course, much depends on just what "capacitybuilding" means...

...On a recent visit, the chair of the UN sanctions committee suggested that Liberia was on track to having the sanctions lifted, although many observers remain skeptical that this will occur at the next review...

...major loans in 1906 and 1912 resulted in foreigners being appointed to various positions in the Liberian government to ensure that the money would be repaid...

...If GEMAP follows through on this potential, it will be an invaluable part of the effort to reinvigorate Liberian democracy...

...Considering that GEMAP could serve as a new model for humanitarian intervention and for dealing with collapsed states, Luigi Giovine is judicious: "As long as it is understood you can't just take the Liberian GEMAP, change the name of the country . . . The main legacy, that it was drafted, negotiated, and passed should encourage others...

...What's needed now is for these measures to be implemented before the management contracts become final, cementing GEMAP's role in cultivating democracy in Liberia...

...Tarr explains: "It would appear there's one reason: all the sectors of government are interrelated . . . [but the interventions] focus on a single issue of governance that artificially breaks the links...

...Tarr counts no fewer than twenty previous efforts by the "international community" to intervene in the financial management of Liberia...

...each for development projects throughout the country...

...If you called for a European World Bank rep for Africa, they'd send you Luigi...

...Asked whether he thinks it's problematic that GEMAP was agreed to by an unelected government, Giovine replies, "All parties agreed that GEMAP was a response to threats to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement's implementation...

...Audits of state-owned enterprises have revealed crippling degrees of mismanagement...

...Where CEDE's founder and former interim government chair Amos Sawyer was critical of GEMAP's infringement on Liberian sovereignty, Pajibo is just as critical of the supposed sovereignty: "The sovereignty the [transitional] government is claiming has no substantial basis...

...One of the new president's first acts was to sack the entire staff of the Finance Ministry, and she has ordered ministers of the transitional government not to leave the country...

...Again and again, Liberia's need for development funds forced it into desperate measures...

...It [GEMAP] has very limited grassroots support . . . people don't know it...

...In the meantime the government has announced a 30 percent increase in revenues over the previous year and that it will use the funds to supply $10,000 (U.S...

...Soon, trains may again ferry iron ore to the port of Buchanan on the coast...

...While Baghdad burns and Iraq keeps turning corners, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has become the first woman to be elected head of state in Africa, and, at this writing, she's promised to turn the lights on in Monrovia within her first six months...

...The fact that the government is corrupt and the chairman signed the document anyway is an indication of the gravity of the problem," Giovine says...