How Liberia wrote off its debts

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2020

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

How the Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was negotiated to write off billions of dollars of debt, accumulated over two decades of civil war. Coming to power in 2006, Johnson Sirleaf had to govern the West African country with little tax revenue and owing large sums to countries and institutions it could never hope to pay back. Over four years, with intensive negotiations with multiple parties and even support from the Irish rock star Bono, in 2010 the World Bank and International Monetary Fund announced they would forgive 4.6 billion dollars of the country’s debt.Bob Howard speaks to former president Johnson Sirleaf about the long road to debt forgiveness.

Photo: Ellen John Sirleaf Credit: Olivier Polet/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:39.2	I'm Bob Howard.
0:41.2	Today I'm talking to the former president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, about her
0:46.6	fight to get billions of dollars worth of debts written off after two decades of civil
0:51.4	war in the West African nation.
0:53.6	What happens to a country in war and what you face post-war
1:00.5	is so awesome, it's very difficult to be able to tell the whole story of that.
1:07.0	Liberia is Africa's oldest republic, situated on the continent's Atlantic coast.
1:13.0	Relentless fighting in the 1980s and 1990s left an estimated 250,000 people dead
1:20.0	from a population of just three and a half million.
1:23.2	Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard trained economist,
1:26.4	became Africa's first female elected president
1:29.5	two years after the end of the war.
1:32.0	I took about the presidency after elections in January 2006.
1:40.0	The country was devastated. Our economy had collapsed, our institutions have become totally
	...

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