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Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (born October 19, 1938) is the 24th and current President of Liberia, in office since 2006. She served as Minister of Finance under President William Tolbert from 1979 until the 1980 coup d’état, after which she left Liberia and held senior positions at various financial institutions. She placed second in the 1997 presidential election won by Charles Taylor. She won the 2005 presidential election and took office on 16 January 2006, and she was re-elected in 2011. Sirleaf is the first elected female head of state in Africa. In June 2016, she was elected as the Chair of the Economic Community of West African States, making her the first woman to occupy that position since it was formed.
Sirleaf was jointly awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen.
The women were recognized “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
Sirleaf was conferred the Indira Gandhi Prize by President of India Pranab Mukherjee on 12 September 2013. As of 2016, she is listed as the 83rd most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.
Sirleaf’s father was Gola and her mother had mixed Kru and German ancestry.
While not Americo-Liberian in terms of ancestry, Sirleaf is considered culturally Americo-Liberian by some observers or assumed to be Americo-Liberian.
However, Sirleaf does not identify as such.
Sirleaf’s father, Jahmale Carney Johnson, was born into an impoverished rural region. He was the son of a minor Gola chief named Jahmale and one of his wives, Jenneh, in Julijuah, Bomi County. Her father was sent to Monrovia, where he changed his surname to Johnson due to his father’s loyalty to President Hilary R. W. Johnson, Liberia’s first native-born president. He grew up in Monrovia, where he was raised by an Americo-Liberian family with the surname McCritty. Sirleaf’s father later became the first Liberian from an indigenous ethnic group to sit in the country’s national legislature.
Sirleaf’s mother was also born into poverty in Greenville. Her grandmother, Juah Sarwee, sent Sirleaf’s mother to Monrovia when Sirleaf’s German grandfather had to flee the country after Liberia declared war on Germany during World War I. A member of a prominent Americo-Liberian family, Cecilia Dunbar, adopted and raised Sirleaf’s mother.
Sirleaf was born in Monrovia in 1938 and attended the College of West Africa from 1948 to 1955. She married James Sirleaf when she was 17 years old, later divorcing in 1960 or 1961 due to his abusive nature. The marriage resulted in four sons and left Sirleaf in the role of homemaker. Early on in their marriage, James worked for the Department of Agriculture and Sirleaf worked as a bookkeeper for an auto-repair shop.
She traveled with James to the United States in 1961 to continue her studies and earned an associate degree in accounting at Madison Business College, in Madison, Wisconsin. When they returned to Liberia, James continued his work in the Agriculture Department and Sirleaf pursued a career in the Treasury Department (Ministry of Finance).
Following her divorce, Sirleaf did not have a bachelor’s degree, so in 1970 she enrolled at the Economics Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she spent the summer preparing for graduate studies.
Sirleaf studied economics and public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1969 to 1971, gaining a Master of Public Administration. She then returned to her native Liberia to work under the government of William Tolbert, where she became the Assistant Minister of Finance.
While in that position, she attracted attention with a “bombshell” speech to the Liberian Chamber of Commerce that claimed that the country’s corporations were harming the economy by hoarding or sending their profits overseas.
Sirleaf served as assistant minister from 1972 to 1973 under Tolbert’s administration. She resigned after getting into a disagreement about spending.
Subsequently, she was Minister of Finance from 1979 to April 1980. Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, a member of the indigenous Krahn ethnic group, seized power in a 12 April 1980 military coup; Tolbert was assassinated and all but four members of his cabinet were executed by firing squad. The People’s Redemption Council took control of the country and led a purge against the former government.
Sirleaf initially accepted a post in the new government as President of the Liberian Bank for Development and Investment, though she fled the country in November 1980 after publicly criticizing Doe and the People’s Redemption Council for their management of the country.
Sirleaf initially moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the World Bank before moving to Nairobi in 1981 to serve as Vice President of the African Regional Office of Citibank. She resigned from Citibank in 1985 following her involvement in the 1985 election in Liberia and went to work for Equator Bank, a subsidiary of HSBC. In 1992, Sirleaf was appointed as the Director of the United Nations Development Programme’s Regional Bureau for Africa at the rank of Assistant Administrator and Assistant Secretary General (ASG), from which she resigned in 1997 to run for president in Liberia. During her time at the UN, she was one of the seven internationally eminent persons designated in 1999 by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the Rwandan genocide, one of the five Commission Chairs for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue and one of two international experts selected by UNIFEM to investigate and report on the effect of conflict on women and women’s roles in peace building. She was the initial
Chairperson of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) and a visiting Professor of Governance at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).
In 1956, Sirleaf married James Sirleaf, whom she later divorced. She grew up as a Presbyterian, but later joined her husband’s Methodist faith. Sirleaf is the mother of four sons, and she has ten grandchildren. She is a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and an honorary member of the Links, Incorporated. She is the aunt to American actress/comic Retta (born Marietta Sirleaf), the actress who portrays “Donna” on NBC’s Parks and Recreation. Among her relatives, several serve in the Liberian government. Robert Sirleaf served as head of the National Oil Company of Liberia, Charles Sirleaf in a senior position at the Central Bank of Liberia and Fombah Sirleaf serving as head of the National Security Agency.
Other members of the Sirleaf family are serving in other positions in government.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf net worth is estimated $ 1.2 billion {Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s net worth according to Forbes} (net worth estimated in 2017).
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