Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female head of state on the African continent, thinks women “absolutely” make better leaders.
“If we had more women in power, we would see faster dialogue and action,” she said during the inaugural TIME100 Africa Summit in Rwanda’s capital Kigali on Friday.
“If we had more women in power, we would see faster dialogue and action,” she said during the inaugural TIME100 Africa Summit in Rwanda’s capital Kigali on Friday.
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00:00 Your presidency marked a period of optimism and hope for Liberia. Looking back now, what do you
00:08 consider to be your most significant achievement and the legacy that you've left for the country?
00:13 At two decades of conflict, of violence against women and children,
00:23 the lacking of civil society in promotion of the democratic space,
00:30 and the only way I could have carried out my two terms was to
00:37 preach, engage, encourage peace. That was my legacy.
00:46 Your most important legacy was peace. That's pretty powerful, considering what you went through.
00:52 And your leadership during your, well, the Ebola crisis took place during your leadership,
00:59 and your actions were widely praised. Can you describe some of the key decisions and actions
01:07 that contributed to your successful containment of the pandemic, and what lessons could be applied
01:12 to the COVID-19 pandemic more recently and into the future? I want to start with Ebola,
01:18 because that's where you started. Ebola was, for us, a strange disease that we know how to confront.
01:26 It started in the northeast of our country, but very quickly, because borders are free,
01:32 came into the capital city. And our first response was one of militancy.
01:38 Stop the people from moving across. Well, that didn't work, because few people were hurt.
01:46 One person even died. So quickly, the decision was to make sure we do something about it,
01:54 that we put the identification of the problem, the symptoms of the problem, in the hands of
02:04 communities. And that's how we began to see community health workers as being so vital
02:12 in the role. The other thing that I was faced with was because people were dying, but we have
02:23 some of our citizens who have a burial system that placed a lot of attention
02:31 on how they prepared the dead and how they buried the dead.
02:38 And the result was that so many people were being exposed, not properly buried.
02:46 And I think this was the hardest decision of mine, was to give the order for cremation.
02:56 We saved thousands of lives by doing that, but it wasn't easy, because the Christian
03:06 citizens protested. People who had families that had been victimized and died,
03:13 cried and protested, but it had to be done. And I think the final one was
03:21 to get people to accept the fact that we had to do what we had to do, communication with the people,
03:33 so that civil society could appreciate why we had to do the things we did, how we were to travel in
03:41 places, how we were to protect our nurses and doctors because they were dying. So we had to go
03:49 into places and put ourselves in harm's way to give confidence to our nurses and doctors.
03:59 But I'm so glad, although we lost over 5,000 people,
04:06 that we were able to confront this disease and to be able to win it. And because of that,
04:16 COVID-19 for us was not as difficult. Our community health workers now knew the symptoms
04:28 of infectious diseases and could do something about it. They now knew how to do primary
04:38 response to people as they waited for health care from professionals. And let me say one thing on
04:47 Ebola. I want to say that the African Union has been so great. In Ebola, they came to our rescue.
04:57 Our partnership also, European countries, the United States of America, that partnership was
05:03 vital and it helped us in COVID-19. Today, I'm a big advocate for supporting health care workers
05:11 and our African Union has taken up this charge. One of the initial responses, both with COVID-19
05:19 and even with Ebola, was closing borders. Does that work? No. It's true that major crossings
05:29 from particularly among the three affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire,
05:37 major crossings, making sure that we had security personnel to manage the crossing work.
05:49 But closing borders never really work. You know, our people move across borders at will
05:54 and we're so interconnected anyway, you know, across religion, across language and all of that.
06:04 So the biggest thing I think is communication. Communicating to people so they know why you
06:11 have regulations, why you have to impose certain discipline. And I think if you say it with
06:20 honesty and admit sometimes when you're wrong, like in our militancy, we had to go to the people
06:29 and say, "Sorry, this we should not have done." And we have changed it. And I think our people
06:36 were very pleased with how we managed the process. A little bit of humility is important for
06:42 leadership. Absolutely. What do you see as the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing
06:51 Africa today? And how can your experience in leadership help contribute to those opportunities
06:58 and make them stronger? Sad to say this, but the most important issue for leadership today
07:11 is the fragmentation among the global powers of the world. That has affected multilateralism
07:24 and the effectiveness that comes from that. It has affected global cooperation and it has
07:32 prevented the action and response to where we now have wars. So I think that's the most important
07:41 one. I always say though, and have to say that an important impediment to progress
07:51 is the promotion of women, ensuring that they have the leadership to be able to put in place
07:58 the policies that will first of all counter the victimization of women through violence,
08:06 but more importantly, the leadership of women in places where they are going to safeguard
08:12 the rights of society, safeguard the rights of women and children.
08:20 And how does that fit into the fragmentation that you've been talking about? And we're seeing
08:24 conflict across the world. What are the priorities? What will bring us together
08:28 to help assuage some of the fallout of these conflicts? We have to see
08:34 the major powers of the world see a changing global situation,
08:43 see the threats to life through climate change, through artificial intelligence and all of that,
08:50 to see how it has affected most of the least developed or poorer countries of the world,
08:58 and to recognize that their interaction of the world, of countries across the world,
09:06 there are no borders that can stop people moving across. Interaction through financial operations,
09:15 through health operations, diseases travel across borders as we found out with COVID-19.
09:21 And so I think we need to see the powers who are represented in what is called a G7 group
09:30 and a G20 group have to now take up this challenge of bringing back the kind of international order
09:39 that we knew in the past decade or so, so that we can address these global threats
09:48 that have not been known, that if we do not do it, the entire world is at stake
09:57 in terms of being able to achieve the economic goals that have been set,
10:03 being able to ensure that people have a right to participation in things.
10:11 Going back and those who have been the least developed, those who have been marginalized,
10:21 can also feel ownership in global action to address the world's problems and make sure that
10:30 we may not have full prosperity for all, but let's ensure that if people have a right to achieve
10:37 their goals and that they're not denied the opportunities for this. So more listening,
10:43 less shouting. Absolutely. Your post-political role has focused on the promotion of women,
10:51 seeing them as a catalyst for change. Do you think women make better leaders?
10:55 Absolutely.
10:58 I don't want to call names, but I think if we look around, you know, and that's not just in Africa,
11:10 but also if you look around in Europe, you look around, you see that women, because women
11:21 rule a little bit differently. First of all, women have equality in every way, in knowledge,
11:29 in education, whatnot. But women bring in a bit of empathy, you know, a bit of compassion, a bit of
11:38 trying to mediate rather than to make war. And if I think if we had more women right now in the major
11:48 powers, you would see faster action in trying to promote dialogue and mediation rather than
11:55 the victors of war. I'll vote for that. President Sirleaf, I want to thank you for being here.