After 14 years of civil war, Liberia is having an election – cause enough for celebration, but what could be even more important is that one of the two candidates in the run-off is a woman. This is not the aspect of the story that has received most Western (or at least European) attention, since her opponent is the ex-star footballer George Weah, a man who did not complete his school education and who has no administrative or political experience.<\/p>\n
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, by contrast, is a Harvard-educated economist, who has considerable high-level UN experience and has previously been a Liberian government minister. <\/p>\n
Women’s eNews reports that she would be Africa’s first elected female president<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now I’m lary of suggestions that women are likely to be more competent and less corrupt than men (it is a very large claim, and assumes some fundamental gender difference I doubt is there – think of Imelda Marcos). And in the corrupt, dangerous world of Liberian politics, no one is entirely “clean”; questions have been asked about the people behind Weah, while Johnson-Sirleaf did briefly back the hideous warlord Charles Taylor.<\/p>\n But given Africa’s enormous governance problems, something different is surely worth a try. After 14 years of civil war, Liberia is having an election – cause enough for celebration, but what could be even more important is that one of the two candidates in the run-off is a woman. This is not the aspect of the story that has received most Western (or at least European) attention, since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","author-natalie-bennett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWomen<\/a>, Africa<\/a>, Liberia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"