Liberia's Ebola Pandemic: A Case of Institutional Failure

As the Brussels Airlines flight lifted from the runway of the Roberts International Airport in Margibi, Liberia on the evening of September 29, 2014, I became anxiety-stricken – happy and relieved that I was finally on my way back to the US to continue my studies, but sad that I was leaving my family and my country. Liberia is once again being decimated, not by bullets this time, but by the Ebola Virus pandemic. The pandemic that first hit Liberia temporarily in February - March returned in July with renewed vigor, bringing down the entire country’s healthcare system, a scenario that was unthinkable a year earlier.

Liberia was celebrating its first decade of peace following one of the most destructive civil wars in modern history.  The civil war that ended officially in June 2003 left 10 percent of the country’s population dead, and a quarter million as refugees or internally displaced persons. So in June 2013, Liberians celebrated what might have been an unthinkable feat – 10 years of no war! Their country was now on a steady course of peace,  progress, hope, and development. Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf remarked during the celebrations: “The gains we are making are irreversible. Liberia is enjoying sustained peace and stability, and is experiencing robust growth and improvement in social and economic well-being.” From Johnson-Sirleaf’s standpoint, Liberia was a post-conflict statebuilding success story. “That is something for which we should all be proud! It means that with every passing year, we are putting the dreadful spectre of war further and further behind us,” she added.
But data from the Liberia Institute for Statistics and Geo-Information Services (LISGIS) and the UNDP Human Development Report seem to paint a rather different picture about the social and economic wellbeing of Liberians.  According to a recent report by LISGIS, about 79 percent of Liberians of employment age are working in “precarious circumstances” with no social protection and limited possibilities for attaining economic security. Besides, the country’s human development index (HDI) remains low. Liberia ranks among the last 15 of 186 countries in the world listed in the UNDP Human Development Report 2013.  With an HDI of 0.388, Liberia is below the average HDI of 0.466 for low HDI countries and below the average of 0.475 for Sub-Saharan Africa.  When discounted for inequality, Liberia HDI falls to 0.251, a loss of 35.3 percent of its human development potential due to inequality in education, life expectancy, and income.

All of these difficulties are happening in the wake of a rather favorable economic growth with growth rates of 5.3%, 6.1%, 7.9%, and 8.3% in 2009-12, respectively. Since 2006, Liberia has attracted about $16 billion in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Liberia also received the World Bank Doing Business 2014 survey’s designation as the 31st place globally and the fifth easiest place in Africa to start a business. President Johnson-Sirleaf believes that these indicators are excellent testimonies to the progress the country has made in building robust state institutions that address the contextual gaps created by the civil war – the capacity, the security, and the legitimacy gaps. These gaps impede the state’s ability to deliver the public goods that guarantee the socioeconomic wellbeing of its population through long-term political protection for both the strong and the weak, performing statutory obligations that ensure both physical and economic security of its citizens and the existence of legitimate political institutions.  
For the ordinary Liberian, the Liberian state has failed in the delivery of these public goods. Prior to the Ebola outbreak, the government was unable to meet its statutory obligations outlined in its annual budget with several reports of budget shortfall, as the legislators successively demanded the increase in their emoluments over the welfare of the general population as a pre-condition for the passage of the national budget.  At the same time, the Liberian dollar depreciated against the US dollar, jumping from 79 Liberian dollars to one US dollar in April to an all-time high of 90 Liberian dollars to one US dollar by July. This decline in the strength of the Liberian dollar did have serious implications for the wellbeing of Liberia’s poor who constitute the majority of country’s population. It also indicated the extent to which Liberians have come to distrust their government as the guarantor of economic stability, and keeping the Liberian dollar as a stable store of wealth and economic security.  There has also been the issue of corruption dogging public officials.

The Liberian media have been awash with reports of financial malfeasance by government officials, with little or no legal action against these officials.  In a recent meeting with members of her cabinet, President Johnson-Sirleaf acknowledged the declining trust of the public in her government’s commitment to the fight against corruption. Liberia is ranked 83rd among 177 countries on the Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perception Index, an index based on public perception of how corrupt a country’s public sector is.

When people are denied economic security and political participation, they will pursue every action collectively in order to regain these basic human needs. However, if such collective action as public protest or civil upheaval are not possible, people will either absent themselves from the state or governance system or the state becomes absent in their lives, even at the perils of their own lives. This has been the nature of the relationship between the state and its people in Liberia.  By the time of the Ebola outbreak, the Liberian state had lost its legitimacy, become absent, while its authority continued to wither away. Nothing demonstrated this better than the huge disbelief and contempt that greeted the government’s announcement of the outbreak in July.  At the time, many Liberians believed that the announcement was only a ploy by the government to attract donor monies. It took weeks of reports of a rising death toll, including among members of the same families, and an intensive community-sensitization effort by local community leaders to rectify this disbelief, though the contempt for the government remained ever present. 

The Ebola crisis has therefore been only a tipping point, highlighting the uneasy calm that has characterized the state-society relationship and the institutional crisis of the statebuilding process in Liberia. While the government and its international partners paint a picture of Liberia as a country with beautiful and enviable statebuilding architecture, the focus on the institutional landscape alone – the presence of a market economy, the successive elections, the operations of a criminal justice system, etc. – has negated the significance of the institutional arrangements in the country’s statebuilding process. The phrase "institutional arrangements" refers to the inner workings of state institutions in addressing the issues of the distribution of political power and economic wealth. Institutional arrangements indicate whether state governance is producing fundamental changes in the lives of the population that are conflict-sensitive – addressing the root cause of the conflict.

The focus on the institutional landscape alone makes statebuilding intervention a superficial process.  Emphasizing institutional arrangements over the institutional landscape ensures that the focus of the statebuilding is concerned not only with the immediate impact of the conflict on state institutions, but extending statebuilding to addressing the root cause of the conflict.  In Liberia’s case, this emphasis on the institutional landscape over the institutional arrangements has ignored the significant micro issues of inequality, poverty, and deprivation, as well as whether the governance of state institutions has produced fundamental changes in the lives of most Liberians. The Liberian government has consistently increased its budgetary allocations to institutions believed to have direct and significant relationship to the wellbeing of its population: health, water and sanitation, education, and public works (i.e. physical infrastructure). The social and economic development impacts of these commendable increases in budgetary allocations are not clear, however, and there are concerns in the population that the implementation of this fiscal policy tool is extractive and not inclusive. More than 60 percent of the population live in poverty and lack access to basic social services such as healthcare, safe drinking water and sanitation, and quality education.   

For a country whose conflict was generated by structural inequality, poverty, and bad governance, the emphasis on the institutional landscape is good, but the focus on the institutional arrangements should be paramount.  As the country and its international partners intensify the fight against this deadly scourge, Liberia needs a serious rethink about the functioning and arrangements of its state institutions. The Liberian state needs to reorient its governance towards emphasis on the arrangements of its institutions away from the preoccupation with the institutional landscape. This is not about designing institutions beautifully on paper and announcing them at public ceremonies or in reports to international partners. This is about ensuring that the functioning of these institutions produce positive fundamental changes in the lives of Liberians, changes that address the root cause of the country’s conflict. Papers and reports do not bleed, people do! And only a statebuilding intervention that is conflict-sensitive and inclusive can prevent this bleeding.

### Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ogbodo Solution (Police in Liberia looking for Ebola patients who fled a clinic)