IRIN Focus on the development crunch

Economic and commercial activity remain stagnant, the damage to infrastructure is still evident and most social services function poorly or not at all in Liberia, a country struggling to recover from a war that ended three years ago. The West African nation hit the news when a popular uprising to unseat military ruler Sergeant Samuel Doe began in December 1989. What quickly became a war between a multiplicity of factions dragged on until 1997, leaving death, destruction and displacement in its wake. Now, however, Liberia is no longer considered in emergency. As a result, it "is not getting the kind of international media attention it would otherwise get if the guns were still blazing," says UNICEF’s representative in the country, Scholastica Kimaryo. The sectors worst affected have been schools, utilities, health and employment, UNDP’s economic adviser in Liberia, Lamine Manneh, told IRIN. Social problems have worsened: teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, school dropout rates and crime have increased rapidly. However, economic and social policy-making bodies and government institutions are still weak. The government has had limited success in tackling these problems: water and electricity, for example, are still not being delivered to homes. However, the government says it has filled many potholes in city streets. Economic activity is increasing and businesses are beginning to renovate their premises. Outside the capital, the government says, roads are being repaired, tools and seeds being distributed to farmers and schools and health services being provided. Moreover, the largest rubber company in the country, managed by Firestone, has resumed operation and so have several logging companies, the government indicated in a two-year post-war national reconstruction programme presented at a special donors’ meeting in Paris in 1998. Liberia said at the meeting that it needed at least US $433 million to meet priority reconstruction targets. However, the reconstruction effort is threatened by continued instability in the northern county of Lofa - where fighting broke out in early July between pro-government forces and dissidents - and by unfulfilled donor pledges. Manneh said pledges were just short of the government’s requests, but actual inflows were barely 20 to 30 percent "because the donors made their pledges contingent on the government meeting certain conditions". Areas in which doubts exist as to the commitment of the government include human rights and transparency. The student union of the University of Liberia voiced another source of concern when, on 28 July, it criticised the "growing economic mismanagement" of the country’s resources. The government has acknowledged that it does not have enough trained manpower to implement rapid change, a view Kimaryo supports. She told IRIN that Liberia lacked the capacity for self-regeneration after a war. This, she said, was an issue that transcended politics, that had to do with Liberia’s need for international solidarity beyond funding. "It requires assistance in creative ways of looking at how to build capacity,"she told IRIN on 8 July. "There’s always a danger that unless these issues are understood in context and supported, this country could easily slide into another civil war." To avoid this, the government has included institutional capacity building in its implementation framework. Apart from retraining the existing - and sometimes demotivated- staff, the reconstruction plan calls for use of Liberian expatriates via a UNDP programme that involves the transfer of knowledge through overseas-based nationals and other schemes. The UNDP’s Manneh said while the UN system had concentrated on capacity building and meeting the country’s humanitarian needs, Liberia’s infrastructure programme had been "woefully under funded". Normally, he said, Liberia would look to the IMF and World Bank to finance the restoration of services such as water and electricity "but the country doesn’t have a normal relationship with these institutions because of its arrears" on a US $2.8 billion external debt. This and the ongoing accusations of Liberian government involvement in arms and diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone will likely ensure that very little development aid flows to the country. But analysts say this would punish ordinary Liberians and not the targeted political leaders. "There is need for creative and sympathetic understanding (of Liberia) in order to be able to find ways in dealing with those things that are political, while at the same time underpinning human survival and development," Kirmaryo said.