Harvard educated economist Ms. Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf is Liberia’s twenty-third president and also the first female president in the country’s one hundred and fifty-nine years of independence. Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf has also made history for being the first female African president. With a dynamic political career spanning over three decades, she has earned the nickname “The Iron Lady” in Liberia . |
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Born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital on October 29 1938, Johnson-Sirleaf has witnessed and played an active role in the country’s political history. After completing her high school education at the College of West Africa in Monrovia, she traveled to the United States in 1961 where she studied at Madison Business College in Wisconsin and at the University of Colorado. With a BA in Accounting and an Economics degree, she proceeded to Harvard University where she acquired her masters degree in public administrations in 1971. |
Upon her return to Liberia in 1972, she served as Assistant Minister of Finance for seven years and then as Minister of Finance for a year under President Tolbert before his assassination by Samuel Doe in 1980. Fortunate enough to escape a firing squad that killed thirteen cabinet ministers, she went into exile in Nairobi, Kenya where she worked for CitiBank as the Vice President between 1982 and 1985. She returned to Liberia in 1985 and ran for senate but was sent into exile for a second time when she spoke up against the Doe regime. During that period, she moved to the United States where she worked as an economist for CitiBank and World Bank in Washington, D.C between 1989 and 1996. |
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In 1996, she returned to Liberia and ran as a presidential candidate under the Unity Party against Charles Taylor but she lost. During Taylor’s presidential term, Liberia erupted into a seven-year civil war and in the midst of the chaos; he fled the country to Nigeria. During his absence, a Governance Reform Commission was set up to end Liberia’s civil war and a presidential election was also organized. |
In November 2005, she ran against former Liberian soccer star, George Weah. Ms. Ellen Johnson- Sirleaf won this election with a twenty percent margin and on January 16, 2006, she was inaugurated as the twenty-third president of Liberia. |
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