Liberia's Streets, Spirits Brighten

Four Years After War's End, Battered W. African Nation Begins a Slow Reawakening

MONROVIA, Liberia -- So brazen were the robbers in parts of Monrovia's Paynesville district that they often sang a terrifying serenade, "I Hear My Blessing Coming," in the moments before they lifted their victims into the air, rifled through their pockets and ran off into the night.

Then in September -- more than four years after warlord Charles Taylor stepped down as president, ending the country's disastrous civil war -- a pair of diesel generators no larger than tool sheds rumbled to life in one of Paynesville's most lawless neighborhoods. Operated by the national power company, they produced just enough electricity to operate streetlights. The robbers retreated. The singing stopped.

The excruciatingly slow pace of reconstruction frustrates many Liberians as they try to navigate a postwar world of high unemployment, rising food prices and ruined national infrastructure. But small victories such as the restoration of power in some sections of Monrovia, the capital, have allowed Liberians to begin restoring the frayed fabric of their society.

Schoolchildren trying to make up years of lessons lost to war now do their homework outside under streetlights. Market women earn another dollar or two by trading late. Teenagers play midnight soccer on the street. A bar wired into the steady flow of power offers a new treat: soft ice cream.

There is still crime in the most notorious part of Paynesville, a neighborhood known as Red Light for its traffic signals, which remain darkened. But the robbers have moved away from the main roads and now behave far more cautiously, residents and police say. Every major category of crime has fallen since the lights went on, official statistics show.

"It has a limit now," said Musu Mulbah, 32, sitting in the orange glow of a streetlight as she speared chunks of marinated meat onto metal rods and set them on a charcoal grill.

Her modest business now stays open until midnight, hours later than she considered safe when the singing robbers roamed without fear of detection. "There used to be no lights, so they were floating all around," she recalled.

Chief Inspector J. Alexander Kollie, of the Zone 5 police station nearby, confirmed the decline with a parody of the robbers' infamous song. "No more blessing coming," he said with a smile and the hint of a melody.

Thirteen years of almost continuous war, ending with the exile of warlord-turned-president Taylor in 2003, left Liberia's once-extensive power grid devastated. The biggest blow came early in the conflict, when terrified technicians abandoned the controls of the Mount Coffee hydroelectric dam as Taylor's rebel army advanced. The St. Paul River rose and destroyed a crucial earthen dam -- a blow from which Liberia's electrical supply has not yet recovered.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, elected in 2005 on pledges of bringing technocratic competence to the battered nation, arrived in office without any public power generation in her seaside capital. Only people with the means to pay for expensive private generators had lights.

"There was nothing at all," said Harry J. Yuan Sr., managing director of Liberia Electricity Corp., recalling the frustration.

Former American slaves founded Liberia in 1822, and the United States long has played an outsize role in Liberia's national dramas, much as the British and French have in their former African colonies. Monrovia is named for U.S. President James Monroe. Aid from the United States helped the power company restore the first pieces of the public system in 2006. Ghana and the European Union also contributed.