Speedy at Work

Liberia's ramshackle capital of Monrovia used to look a little like a gigantic Mississippi riverboat minstrel show. The men at the Masonic Lodge dressed in top hats and black morning coats; the ladies at the Baptist church wore flowing skirts and bandannas; and everybody spoke in an exaggerated Deep South drawl. In these mannerisms they imitated both their forebears, freedmen who returned from the U.S. in 1822 and subsequently founded Africa's first republic, and their president, William Vacanarat Shadrach ("Uncle Shad") Tubman, who ran the country with a kind of dandified despotism from 1944 until his death in 1971.

Today the old ways are changing. Monrovia is still beset by some of the worst slums in Africa, and they lie within 500 yards of Tubman's splendiferous $15 million Executive Mansion. But the man in the mansion today, William Richard Tolbert Jr., 59, has plans for reform, and he seems to mean business. Very few Liberians expected anything like that. Tolbert had served 19 silent and subservient years as Vice President under "Uncle Shad." He also came from the same small elite of "Americo-Liberians" who have ruled the country pretty much in their own interests for more than a century. (There are 45,000 Americo-Liberians in a population of 1,500,000, and they hold virtually all the nation's wealth.)

On Inauguration Day in 1971, however, Tolbert toured his capital in a Volkswagen instead of the Tubman Cadillac, and he showed up for the swearing-in ceremony in an open-neck, short-sleeved safari suit instead of the Tubman top hat. He also got rid of his predecessor's $2,000,000 yacht.

More important, Tolbert dismantled Tubman's four competing security services, purged the corrupt police department and encouraged the long-muzzled press to speak out. He shook up the somnolent civil service by showing up at the stroke of 8 a.m. to demand that government offices open on time.

One night Tolbert slept in the slums of Monrovia and announced next day a program of "mats to mattresses" aimed at giving every Liberian a proper bed. As a means of developing the backward and neglected interior, he called for a year-long "national rally" to raise $10 million in development funds before his 60th birthday next month. The goal was utterly unrealistic; by last week the campaign had collected less than $2,000,000, including $250,000 cajoled from the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., the country's largest employer. But Tolbert defends his fund raising as a symbolic success. "We don't want a classless society," he says, "but we must narrow the gulf between the too few who are high and the too many who are low."

In his foreign policy, Tolbert has gone a long way toward shedding Liberia's reputation as a docile U.S. colony. While staying on good terms with the U.S., he has established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. He has wheedled a better deal out of foreign concessionaires who export Liberia's iron ore and rubber, increasing the revenues to his treasury by some $5,000,000 a year. He is hoping to attract another $700 million from U.S. and Japanese sources for a huge new iron-ore project at Wologisi (estimated reserves: up to a billion tons).

Liberia urgently needs to expand its agricultural production -the price of imported rice, its diet staple, has doubled in the past two years -but it has little money for development. A full third of the budget goes to service the national debt, and he has still not combed out all of the excesses of the Tubman era.

Two weeks ago, Tolbert suddenly announced that he had uncovered a plot against his regime -a rarity in Liberia, which has not had a successful coup since 1870. Three military men were arrested, but the armed forces chief of staff publicly denounced the plotters' "dastardly deed" and announced a $50,550 contribution by his officers and men to the President's cherished development fund. For the most part, Liberians seem to be delighted with Tolbert's informal manner, and they have even taken to calling him "Speedy." Tubman would have been appalled, but Tolbert does not seem to mind. "If we can manage to speed things up in this country," he says, "I don't care what they call me."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.