Uncle Shad Forever?

In Monrovia last week William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, 68, was inaugurated President of Liberia for the fifth time. Almost each inauguration has given a landmark to the country--a monument here, an assembly hall there. This time, 2,000 workers, about a fifth of Monrovia's labor force, and 150 foreign technicians have been working against time to complete the new executive mansion.

The eight-story "Dream Mansion," as Liberians proudly call it, has an atomic-bomb shelter, an underground swimming pool, a private chapel, a trophy room, a cinema, a strong room large enough to hold all the gold in Africa, and a kitchen big enough to prepare all the fufu (Liberia's national dish, a stew based on the cassava plant) that anyone could eat. Tubman's new home combines the comfort of a garish four-star hotel with the appearance of a department store the week before Christmas.

Spiraling Cost. Approached by a giant horseshoe driveway bordered by artificial ponds, the mansion glistens by day with $1,000,000 worth of solar screens intended to reflect the sunlight and reduce heat, and by night is an explosion of brilliance, studded from top to bottom with dazzling fluorescent lights that are said to attract most of Monrovia's flies. Because of the uncertainty of the city's public utilities, the mansion has its own emergency power plant, water supply and sewage system. Such lavish accouterments plus some eyebrow-raising financing methods explain why the cost of the vast pile has soared from an original estimate of $2,500,000 to a whopping $20 million.

The dignified old executive mansion, with its columned portico reflecting the plantation houses of the antebellum U.S. South, had grown far too small. It sufficed when Tubman first took office in 1944 and Liberia was one of Africa's three independent states and had a budget of scarcely $1,000,000 a year. But today Liberia's budget is some $38 million annually, and its gross national product runs to about $250 million, derived from rubber, iron ore, and vast timber riches that are only beginning to be farmed. As Tubman exchanged visits with the leaders of new African states, the 80-year-old mansion seemed inadequate and embarrassing.

To the Pepper Coast. Liberians had to build their country from scratch. "We did not have the luck to be colonized," is a standard Liberian joke, and it is true that there were no imperial rulers to leave behind post offices and palaces, schools and hospitals. The population, which the government estimates at around 2,000,000, consists of a 99% tribal majority living in primitive isolation in the back country and a 1% governing minority called Americo-Liberians, descended from a group of freed U.S. slaves sent to the Pepper Coast of Africa with the backing of President James Monroe, the U.S. Congress and philanthropic organizations.

Genial Shad Tubman rules Liberia through his True Whig Party and by the judicious use of jobs and "dash"--the local word for payoffs for favors--to keep the important 20,000 Americo-Liberians happy. He has also originated a unification policy intended to pass out political and economic plums to the hinterland tribes and was the first Liberian President to give them representation in the legislature. Half of the U.S. development grants of $8,600,000 a year is earmarked for teacher training and the construction of schools. Tubman quite frankly caters to the Liberian love of status and, though the citizens remain as poor as they ever were, Liberia has a TV transmitter for the nation's few sets and a new marblefaced law court to match the glamour of the executive mansion.

Stunned Silence. For the inauguration last week, guests from 64 countries crowded Monrovia's luxury Ducor Intercontinental Hotel, and paramount chiefs representing Liberia's 20-odd tribes brought with them retinues of up to 30 people, including wives, children, relatives, and entertainers such as dancers and drummers. In the streets, delirious crowds held arches of flowers and hurled bushels of confetti as Tubman whirled proudly through the streets in his Cadillac convertible during the inauguration festivities. Applause greeted every pronouncement in his inaugural address until he came to the final ringing sentence: "I enter upon the execution of the sacred task to which I have been called for the fifth and, I earnestly hope, for the last time." That brought stunned, unbelieving silence, for clearly most of the thousands in the audience fully expect that Uncle Shad will go on ruling Liberia forever.

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