Chapter 9
WHAT DEMOCRACY MUST DELIVER
As my car barreled through the streets of Monrovia, I gazed out the window at the happy crowds lining the streets. It was about six in the morning and I was on my way from the airport to our ambassador’s house. There I was planning to meet up with First Lady Laura Bush and together we would attend the inauguration of Liberia’s first democratically elected president in thirty years. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf would also become Africa’s first female head of state.
The mood was celebratory and the people jubilant. But the hard road ahead of the Liberians and their new leaders was evident—literally—at every turn. The streets were full of potholes, despite the efforts that had been made to repair roads quickly in order to receive international guests. The buildings were marked with bullet holes, fresh paint failing to mask the testament to the violence that had racked the country for decades. The water was not drinkable. And insect-borne disease, particularly malaria, was a constant threat. When I lay down to rest for a few moments before going to the ceremony, I did so encased in a mosquito net.
Liberia had no effective security forces; a population that was largely poorly educated, if not illiterate; a minimally functioning health care system; an unreliable power grid that constantly shut down even in the capital; and an economy that was limping along, principally on rubber-harvesting contracts that benefited the corrupt ministers who had negotiated them. This new democracy was a governance nightmare.
Few countries face as many challenges simultaneously as Liberia did. Founded as an American colony to receive freed slaves, it became independent in 1847 with a black American as its president.
For one hundred years, Liberia was considered one of the jewels of Africa, relatively stable and with an educated elite. A series of presidents ruled the country with an iron fist and considerable self-enrichment—but nothing that was really outside the norm for the continent as a whole.
The elites prospered, and at a time when black Americans were faring poorly in the United States, Liberians saw themselves as superior to all other Africans and their descendants. They had, after all, never been slaves. My aunt Theresa Love, a Victorian scholar, was invited to teach at the University of Monrovia in 1960. She told us of being invited on a cruise with President William Tubman and his family. “What shall we speak today?” one person asked. “Why, we shall have to speak English. Theresa doesn’t speak French.”
Tubman, a member of the True Whig Party, did try to improve relations between the African American inhabitants and the indigenous people. In general, the latter were looked down upon, discriminated against, and relegated to poverty and despair. But he tolerated no opposition—his soldiers gunning down a political rival, S. David Coleman, and his son in 1955 for challenging the president. That same year, he amended the constitution to allow him more than two terms. With every region a battleground in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, Liberian disregard for the rule of law and democracy was easily tolerated in Washington. Ironically, Voice of America—broadcasting to people trapped in communist tyranny—located one of its communication facilities in Liberia. When Tubman died after twenty-seven years as president, he was succeeded by his vice president of nineteen years, William Tolbert.
But Tolbert found ruling the country more difficult than his predecessor had. Years of pent-up frustration with inequality were taking their toll. By 1980, opposition leaders were becoming more vocal and Tolbert’s response more authoritarian. The government began arresting members of the rival Progressive People’s Party on charges of treason, claiming that they had been planning violent acts against the government.
The final verdict didn’t come from the political opposition, however. It came from within the army. President Tolbert was assassinated in a military coup and thirteen other cabinet members were executed. Sergeant Samuel Doe assured the United States and the Liberian people that his regime would govern democratically. Constitutional reforms were initiated, and for a brief time the government appeared to be liberalizing the country’s politics. That direction didn’t last.
Doe, now running for president, began to harass his opposition, charging that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—the most visible member of it—had given a speech “detrimental to the peace and stability of the country.” He threatened to put her on trial for sedition. Johnson Sirleaf fled the country for the United States. Doe was elected under a cloud of irregularity—though the United States recognized him as the president of Liberia.
Doe could not govern Liberia either, as warlords took up arms in various parts of the country and challenged the government. One of them was Charles Taylor, who after seven years of civil war emerged as the most successful of the strongmen. He was elected president in 1997 but could not subdue the violent militias of other warlords. Civil war broke out again in April 1999, more brutally than before. Accord after accord failed to hold, though African and international diplomats tried to end the war.
Taylor had no incentive to do so. He and his war machine benefited from the diamond trade as the Liberians smuggled the precious stones from African mines to wealthy merchants in South Africa and Europe. This would lead the world to try to do something about “blood diamonds.” And Taylor would present civilized nations with another outrage: His forces were often child soldiers, some as young as nine years old.
It was the New York Times front-page photograph of one of these boys that finally led the United States to say enough. I took the picture into the Oval Office with me that morning of June 28, 2003. President Bush had already seen the haunting image: A boy, no more than twelve years old, glared at the camera with an AK-47 in one hand and a teddy bear backpack around his shoulders.
When President Bush visited Africa a week later, he vowed publicly to do something to end Liberia’s civil war. In a Rose Garden press conference with Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, he said that he would use American military forces if necessary. That certainly unsettled the Pentagon—and initially the generals said it would take two divisions to oust Charles Taylor.
In the end it took two hundred marines to secure the airport and the seaports while Nigerian-led UN peacekeeping forces entered the country. In August 2003, Taylor was escorted out by a delegation of African heads of state, John Kufuor of Ghana and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria among them. This was a successful—and extremely limited—use of military force to achieve change.
Twenty-three years earlier, a military coup had sparked decades of civil war and misrule. Now a transitional government of experts and technocrats was to govern the country for two years under UN auspices. That led to Johnson Sirleaf’s election and the beginning of the governance challenge ahead.
Where Do You Start?
The Liberian case is instructive because all of the problems of governance that new (or refounded) democracies face were on display. When we think of democratic transitions, we tend to have in mind the creation of political institutions—constitutions, parliaments, a judiciary, and the executive. We are concerned about protecting private space for civil society and the press. This is clearly, as we have seen in the cases above, a crucial challenge—to get the balance right between these parts of the political system and the government and the people.
Fifty-nine countries are, according to Freedom House, “partly free.” They are, in the parlance used in this book, much like quasi-democratic states. They have passed the first test—people are free to elect their leaders and change them peacefully. In most cases, the press is free and civil society is allowed to function. But the institutions are weak and governance problems are manifold. This is the work of democracy promotion—to help them govern better but also democratically. Elections buy time, but the population is impatient. Any state must have the machinery to deliver essential goods and services. Sometimes it is as basic as potable water or reliable electricity.
One thing is clear: Many countries cannot provide for their people without international help. The more dire the situation, the greater the need for international assistance. But foreign assistance cannot and should not replace the national government in the provision of goods. It has to seek simultaneously to improve the lives of people and strengthen indigenous mechanisms for doing so.
The Foreign Assistance Trap
For many years, critics of foreign assistance focused on waste. During the Cold War, as we have seen with Liberia, the superpower rivalry led to strategic assistance. The goal was to induce loyalty from leaders in developing countries, no matter how corrupt they were.
My master’s thesis at Notre Dame sought to understand the U.S. and Soviet motivations for granting aid to developing countries in the period from 1961 to 1973. I tested several variables: the type of political system; geographic importance; existing historical ties. The most potent explanation was competition with the other superpower. If the Soviet Union granted aid to one country, the United States was likely to grant aid to a neighbor. Clearly, the Peace Corps and USAID had larger development goals, but they were often eclipsed by the imperative to counterbalance the other side.
Not surprisingly, foreign assistance earned a reputation for waste—the proverbial money down a rathole. Many leaders in developing countries, particularly in Africa, flaunted their wealth while their people endured subsistence living. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the argument for strategic assistance—a euphemism for funding loyalty in the Cold War—weakened, though there were other reasons for it, particularly in the Middle East. The Camp David Accords, for instance, produced a formula for aid to Israel and Egypt as long as they kept their commitments to peace. The latter has been a source of controversy as the government in Cairo has repeatedly failed to reform.
Over the last twenty years or so, however, donors have become more demanding about the uses of foreign assistance, insisting on accountability from governments. Transparency initiatives are now commonplace, helping donors to get a handle on the levels of corruption in developing countries. More than at any other time, foreign assistance is going largely to the purposes for which it was intended.
Yet there is still a question as to its effectiveness. Poverty rates have come down. Progress has been made on the Millennium Development Goals, a United Nations initiative begun in 2000 to create global partnerships for eradicating poverty, improving women’s health and gender equality, reducing disease and child mortality, globalizing primary education, and promoting environmental sustainability. Over its fifteen-year timeline, the program has reached important milestones such as cutting the number of individuals living in extreme poverty and cases of infant mortality by half.
That said, there is also a sense that progress has been slow and that too many countries, some with significant resources, will forever be wards of the international system, unable to provide for their own people. There is a kind of foreign assistance trap. If someone else—in this case the international community—is responsible for delivering goods and services, the domestic machinery will never get stronger and more capable. It is important to feed people, but better if indigenous agriculture can do so. The health care and educational systems have to become capable of doing their jobs. And it would be empowering for legislators to pass bills—democratically—that dealt with a country’s social ills. It is fine to have international NGOs provide services—they are often desperately needed. But at some point the government and local NGOs have to take responsibility for the welfare of the people.
We have seen repeatedly that people expect a lot of leaders when they elect them. They want life to get better and hold their government accountable if it doesn’t. This fact is the cause of a good deal of the instability in new democracies. Governments rise and fall with dizzying speed because they cannot live up to expectations. When the American Founders talked about guaranteeing not just life and liberty but the “pursuit of happiness,” they identified an important challenge of democracy.
Aid Through Them, Not Around Them
Elected leaders in developing countries have to show that they can provide for their people—and they need to show that they are indeed the ones doing the providing. They need a way to escape the foreign assistance trap. This issue has received greater attention in recent years from donor countries. National and international donor agencies have been moving away from traditional approaches to foreign aid based on unconditional grants and other initiatives that circumvent local institutional participation. For instance, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has recently mandated greater engagement with aid-recipient countries in order to promote increased responsibility and accountability within the development process. Across the Atlantic, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has delivered technical assistance to participating states in key governance-related areas such as policing, border management, elections, and others. Increasing attention has also been ascribed by international organizations like the UN to the substantial impact of diaspora communities, which often contribute to economic and institutional development in their countries of origin.
But one of the signature programs launched by the Bush administration and sustained and extended by President Obama was designed specifically to strengthen democratic governance while delivering economic benefits to the population. The two were inextricably linked in the conception of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which was announced in 2002 by President Bush and approved by Congress in 2004. The MCC is an independent U.S. government agency that identifies qualifying countries around the world and awards them significant sums of conditional aid in agreements called compacts. It uses independent and measurable indicators in three broad policy categories: Ruling Justly, Investing in People, and Encouraging Economic Freedom. “Control of corruption” is a key element of the Ruling Justly indicator, and since its inception, the MCC has made significant strides to spur policy reforms in its compact countries. By empowering recipient countries to take the initiative and submit their own proposals for foreign assistance, the MCC has been viewed as taking a more effective approach toward fostering economic and institutional development. This process of inducing countries to initiate policy reform to become eligible for aid has led to a demonstrable impact in the fight against poverty, bureaucratic efficiency, and infrastructure development—even in countries that have not yet won a contract.
The MCC compacts are often highly targeted. For example, Malawi received $350 million to improve hydropower generation. A significant portion of the grant was for technical assistance to improve the operational and financial management of ESCOM, the public electricity utility. The country of Georgia was granted $140 million to improve the quality of education in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Supported by San Diego State University, bachelor’s degree programs were launched at Ilia State University, Tbilisi State University, and the Georgian Technical University. El Salvador received $461 million for an integrated set of investments in logistical infrastructure, education, and regulatory reform in order to spark private-sector-led growth. The project was managed by FOMILENIO II, a government entity with responsibility for overseeing the compact.
The road to developing the compact is also intended to be an exercise in governing. Before the MCC will even consider a request from a qualified country, the government must lead a process engaging all stakeholders. So in Jordan, with a project intended to increase the supply of water to households and businesses, farmers, business leaders, and local government officials were convened numerous times to develop the ask. Jordanian officials told us that it was a real exercise in grassroots democracy, complete with the frustrations of gaining consensus on what would be included—and what would not—in the compact request.
And sometimes the process leads to significant changes in law. I was secretary of state in 2007 when Lesotho signed a $363 million compact to encourage small business development and improvements in public health. In 2013, I shared the stage with the woman responsible for implementing Lesotho’s compact at an MCC anniversary event. Sophia Mohapi had been widowed with four children at the age of thirty-three. Now she had successfully overseen a multimillion-dollar project and had even secured an additional $100 million in funding from the Lesotho government to ensure the project’s sustainability. I was honored to present her with the MCC Country Commitment Award for her accomplishments. After the ceremony, Sophia came over and thanked me for the MCC. It had brought very concrete change to Lesotho, she said. When the MCC learned that married women could not hold title to a business or land in their own name in her country, the government was forced to change the law.
The MCC is not, of course, a panacea for problems of governance. Several compact recipients have been suspended for backsliding on the indicators—Madagascar and Mali lost their assistance because of military coups. The Sandinistas’ efforts to rig local elections in Nicaragua caused the MCC to suspend its compact in 2008. Despite appeals by some local officials, the country’s national leadership refused to meet the basics of democratic governance, and the MCC terminated its contract the following year.
There is little doubt that this approach—large assistance packages for programs developed by the government in coordination with stakeholders—is having an effect. It will take a long time to know how much the MCC is strengthening democratic governance, but the early returns are good. The MCC effect appears to be real.1
In February 2007, I attended a development event with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Washington. “How is it going?” I asked her. “We need to be an MCC country,” she answered. Liberia by no means met the criteria at that time, but before we left office, it was granted threshold status so that it could make the necessary reforms. The country was finally awarded a compact in 2015 to help deal with the unreliable power supply that had stranded President Bush in an elevator in Sirleaf’s office when he visited in 2008.
I went to Liberia in the summer of 2013 with a congressional delegation and Bono, who was one of the first to endorse the MCC. That day we visited a brand-new health care clinic, the JKF Medical Center in Monrovia, which had just received a grant from the Liberian government. The young director, Dr. Wvannie Mae Scott-McDonald, had been trained in the United States and returned to Liberia after the civil war ended. He was another example of the important work that people from the diaspora do in their countries of origin. The lab was clean and efficient and modern. The progress was so inspiring. Maybe they are finally out of the woods, I thought.
One year later, the Ebola crisis hit Liberia. The incipient health care system was quickly overwhelmed, and again, massive foreign assistance was needed to help the country cope. I called Johnson Sirleaf just to see how she was doing. The president was upbeat—particularly given the circumstances. She recalled all the United States had done and all that it was doing to help her through the latest crisis. A year after that, the World Health Organization certified Liberia as “Ebola-free.” The country had survived another brush with catastrophe.
Governing is hard in the most advanced democracies. When the institutions for delivery—the civil service, the educational system, the health care system—are underdeveloped, it is especially hard. Building the infrastructure of democracy—finding the right balance within the government and between the government and its people—takes time. If, in the meantime, leaders are successful in providing for the population, they may have the time that they need.
So it has been with Johnson Sirleaf, whom Liberians reelected to a second term in 2012. Even as she has strengthened Liberia’s institutions, she has never lost sight of the need to deliver for her people. In her second inaugural address she declared that her country had earned its “rightful place as a beacon of democracy,” while acknowledging the many challenges that remain. “The cleavages that led to decades of war still run deep. But so too does the longing for reconciliation,” she said. “True reconciliation means a process of national healing. It means learning the lessons of the past to perfect our democracy. But above all it means economic justice for our citizens and the spread of progress to all our people.” And she meant it.