June 11, 1999
By Ian Yhap (former managing director, Liberia Electricity Corporation)
Before I take you into President Taylor’s office, I need to introduce another character in this story. His name is Edward Sharpe. We call him Ed.
Sometimes Liberia’s heroes appear unexpectedly. They do not necessarily arrive with titles, political connections or any announcement that history should pay attention to them. Sometimes they simply show up at the right moment, recognize what needs to be done and do it. Ed, for me, was one of those people.
He had left Liberia during the war and studied History in Ghana. While there, he became acquainted with Ron Quist. I would describe Ron as something of a mentor to him, and Ron obviously thought highly of the young man.
Ed’s original reason for returning to Liberia had nothing to do with LEC. Ron had arranged financing of more than a million dollars for the reconstruction of the National Archives building, which later housed the National Investment Commission. Ron had brought a construction company into Liberia to undertake the work essentially on credit to the Liberian government, and Ed was among the supervisory personnel working on the project.
I may have met Ed before, possibly even in Ghana. But when he eventually approached me and offered to help at LEC, I honestly did not remember who he was. Perhaps Ron was the bridge between us. Whatever brought him through my door, it did not take me long to discover that Ed was one of those rare d
people who did not need to be told repeatedly what needed doing. He made himself useful.
At LEC, that was no small compliment.
He helped organize personnel. He made cogent suggestions about meaningful things we could actually accomplish. He followed through. He brought a certain order to an institution in which almost everything around us seemed to be fighting against order.
Most importantly for this story, Ed helped me compose, proofread and finalize the letters I was writing to President Taylor. These letters. So Ed knew more than the words on the pages. He knew the circumstances that produced them. And by the end of May 1999, those circumstances had become increasingly difficult.
I had written President Taylor on April 27 warning about what I called “The CAED Dilemma.” I believed the proposed arrangement threatened the much larger vision contained in the Master Energy Recovery and Development Plan. There had been no response.
I remained Managing Director of LEC, but I did not know whether the President still supported the Master Plan, whether CAED remained his preferred direction, or even whether I still enjoyed his confidence. Meanwhile, LEC was expected to function.
Our workers had gone for years without being properly paid. The Corporation had virtually no revenue. We had not even been included in the 1999 national budget, yet we were being asked to provide electricity for the July 26 Independence Day celebrations in Sanniquellie.
I was trying to preserve what remained of LEC’s assets, find money, hold the employees together, pursue financing, deal with donors and somehow continue advocating a national electricity strategy whose political future I could no longer determine.
I was discouraged. Perhaps more than discouraged. I was trying to lead an institution without knowing whether the government still believed in the direction in which I was trying to lead it.
That was why, on May 31, I wrote President Taylor again. This time I did not make another technical argument. I asked for something much simpler: Mr. President, can we talk? I requested an exclusive tête-à-tête.
Not more than two or three days later, word came that President Taylor wanted to see me. I was encouraged. Perhaps this was it. Perhaps he had read my letter and finally decided that the two of us should sit down, without the noise of a Cabinet meeting, and determine where we were going.
I have always had a considerable capacity for optimism. Or perhaps, occasionally, an excessive capacity for forgiveness. The Bible says forgive seventy times seven. Apparently, I was determined to use my full allocation. Ed, however, was less impressed. Or should I say, less optimistic.
As we prepared for the meeting, we began to develop talking points around the issues I had raised in Letter Two. I wanted to be ready if the President was finally prepared to discuss the Master Plan, CAED, financing, LEC and where all of this was going. Ed listened, as he would normally do, to my novel approaches to what I felt would be a favorable meeting for us. Then he said, in substance: “This meeting will be no different.” I disagreed. I was still hopeful. Ed insisted. He would have none of it. And then he made a suggestion that would become far more important than either of us could have imagined at the time.
For some time, we had been discussing one of the fundamental technical decisions required by the Master Energy Recovery and Development Plan: Liberia’s voltage and frequency standards. Liberia had historically operated on a 60-hertz system, while our neighbors operated at 50 hertz.
If MERDP was eventually going to connect Liberia to its neighbors and participate in a regional electricity market, harmonization was not some distant technical curiosity. At some point, Liberia had to make a decision. And if we were ever going to make that decision, this was the time.
The war had destroyed almost everything. There was precious little of the old system left to convert. Every new generator, transformer, distribution line or piece of equipment brought into the country on the old standard would make an eventual conversion more difficult and more expensive.
We had talked about it. We had studied it. But talking about changing a country’s electrical standard and actually changing it were two entirely different things.
Ed’s suggestion was wonderfully simple. Prepare the decision before going to the meeting. Instead of going to the President yet again to explain why Liberia should change its voltage and frequency standards, why not prepare an Executive Order that would accomplish it? Put the document in front of him. If he agreed, let him sign it.
Ed’s reasoning was essentially: “This meeting will be no different. So let’s go prepared to come away with something.” That was Ed Sharpe. Not only sharp, but also infinitely more Liberia savvy than me. I was preparing talking points. Ed knew already that what was needed was action towards nudging the plan forward. And his instincts about the meeting would prove remarkably accurate.
When I arrived at President Taylor’s office, I immediately realized that this was not quite the tête-à-tête I had requested. Someone else was there: the head of the Liberian Taiwanese Friendship organization. That gave me a pretty good idea why I had been summoned.
By then, resources were becoming increasingly scarce, and Taiwan’s annual grant to Liberia was one of the few substantial sources of funds available to the government. I had managed to secure a sizeable portion of that money for LEC, something I understood to be unusual considering how heavily sought after those funds were and the fact that final approval rested with the President.
President Taylor’s first question went straight to it. He wanted to know how I had managed to carve out such a substantial portion of the Taiwanese funds for LEC. I must confess, I felt rather proud. I explained that Richard Tolbert had introduced me to his former Harvard classmate, Colin Kao, then Second Secretary at the Taiwanese Embassy. That introduction had helped eliminate much of the usual red tape and allowed our proposals to receive serious consideration
The President turned toward the head of the Friendship organization in a manner that seemed to acknowledge that what I had told him was consistent with what they understood. There seemed to be no problem. Better still, the atmosphere was cordial.
Compared to the miserable Cabinet meeting only a short time earlier, this was almost another world. I began thinking that perhaps my optimism had been justified after all.
Before I could even begin working my way down the list of grievances Ed and I had so carefully prepared, Taylor seemed to anticipate at least one of them.
He asked about Nimba ’99. Had LEC received the money for the Sanniquellie electrification work? I told him no. And I told him something else: we were rapidly approaching the point where receiving the money would no longer matter. July 26 was not going to move because the Ministry of Finance was late. We needed time to acquire equipment, move materials to Nimba, erect the distribution system, install the streetlights and commission everything. At some point, money arriving too late would simply be money arriving too late.
Taylor acted immediately. He instructed the Ministry of Finance to make the funds available. Following that instruction, $150,000 was released to LEC, and the Ministry requested the pro forma invoice for the generators. I would have preferred LEC to handle the entire transaction itself, but compared with where we had been the day before, I was not about to complain too loudly. I left the generator procurement with the Ministry.
Then came another surprise. The President told me that the Czech Republic had donated some generators to Liberia. This was the first I was hearing about them. At that particular moment in LEC’s existence, you did not have to tell me twice that somebody was giving Liberia generators. On the face of it, this was good news.
So there I was. I had gone into the meeting carrying a list of grievances. Before I had gotten very far down the list, the President had addressed the Sanniquellie money, told me about additional generators, and received my explanation about the Taiwanese funds without difficulty. I was on a roll. God, I concluded, was surely favoring me in this meeting.
And somewhere in the papers I had carried into that office was Ed Sharpe’s Executive Order. Suddenly, presenting it did not seem nearly as difficult. I was encouraged and confident.
I explained again why the change in Liberia’s voltage and frequency standards was fundamental to the Master Energy Recovery and Development Plan. If Liberia intended eventually to interconnect with Côte d’Ivoire and the larger West African electricity network, we needed compatible standards. And if we were going to make the change, the destruction of the war had presented us with an extraordinary, if tragic, opportunity to do it before rebuilding locked us back into the old system.
Meanwhile, international organizations and consultants were already studying the implications of conversion. As I understood the proposals and discussions reaching us, elaborate studies, compensation arrangements, financing packages and potentially enormous loan obligations were being contemplated. I found the whole thing extraordinary.
What exactly were we converting? The war had already done the demolition. There was practically nothing left. Yet every month we delayed, equipment would come into the country, inventories would grow, systems would begin to be reconstructed and Liberia would slowly recreate the very incompatibility that circumstances of war had given us an opportunity to eliminate.
The President read the Executive Order. It was a tense moment for me. He nodded. Then he said: “I will sign it.” I was ecstatic. Breaking protocol I exclaimed in my Liberian patois: “You mon sign it o. Because I going to announce it!”
But President Taylor seemed oblivious to all that as he replied: “Announce it!” That was enough for me. I sensed at that moment that he, like me, had sensed a moment of victory in the midst of Liberia’s confusion.
I want to be precise about what happened because twenty-seven years have passed. I did not stand there and watch President Charles Taylor physically put his signature on the Executive Order. And today, I do not possess a signed copy. What I have is the final unsigned draft prepared for his signature.
But in that meeting, in the presence of others, the President of Liberia told me that he would sign the Executive Order and then expressly authorized me to announce the decision. As Managing Director of LEC, that verbal directive from the President was sufficient authority for me to act. And act I did immediately.
No sooner had I left his office than we began spreading the word. Bulletins went immediately to KISS FM and ELBC. The decision was announced on radio and television. Liberia was changing course. Contemporary reporting later described LEC as rebuilding from almost nothing and using that opportunity to switch to 220 volts and 50 hertz specifically to permit interconnection with electricity systems elsewhere in the subregion.
Ed Sharpe was overjoyed. His insistence that I walk into that meeting with something the President could act upon had paid off. And I was so consumed by what had just happened that I committed a rather remarkable oversight. I forgot to ask where the donated generators were.
Then the vendors came. The reaction began almost immediately. The following day, vendors of electrical supplies began appearing at LEC. Some came with Liberian lawyers. Some appeared to have the support of government officials. Their concern was straightforward. What about the electrical equipment they already had in stock that might now be rendered incompatible or obsolete by the announced change? They wanted to know how compensation would be arranged.
Apparently, some of these vendors had already been interviewed by foreign-funded consultants examining the economic impact of changing Liberia’s electrical standards. Information had been exchanged. Studies were being contemplated.
Financing packages and compensation mechanisms were being discussed, including, as I understood it at the time, potentially substantial international lending that would burden Liberia. And suddenly we had announced the decision without any attendant studies.
The consultants could continue studying whatever needed studying. Legitimate claims could still be examined. Technical implementation still had to be worked out. But the fundamental policy question had been answered and this wouldn’t be the multi-year effort that was contemplated by studies.
Liberia was going to change.
To Ed and me, that was a major victory. We believed the war had created a narrow window in which Liberia could make a decision that would become progressively more difficult with every transformer, generator, appliance and distribution system installed under the old standard.
We had no desire to make Liberia endure an expensive second labor after it had already suffered the terrible labor of destruction. If we had to rebuild almost from scratch, then at least let us decide what we were rebuilding toward. That afternoon, I believed we had done exactly that.
For the moment, everything seemed to be moving smoothly. The Executive Order was not the only encouraging development. We had hired Harrison Gray, an experienced distribution-line contractor, to install the network in Sanniquellie.
We also had approximately $75,000 remaining in LEC’s accounts and made another decision that mattered enormously to me. We paid the employees. To our knowledge, many had received no meaningful salary payments since the beginning of the war.
The exchange rate happened to be extremely favorable to us, and the money stretched much farther than it otherwise might have. As I recall, we were able to give each employee the equivalent of approximately three months’ salary. Three months did not erase years of hardship. But it was something.
Sanniquellie was moving. The workers had finally received some money. The President had directed the release of funds. We had learned that additional generators were available. And most importantly, President Taylor had agreed to sign the Executive Order and authorized me to announce the change in Liberia’s electrical standards. My optimism when I left his office was therefore not imaginary. We had won a major battle. But Ed’s pragmatism had also paid off.
And there is an important historical footnote to that decision. Later in 1999, reporting from Liberia described LEC as rebuilding almost from scratch and explicitly linked the move toward 220 volts and 50 hertz with regional interconnection. Decades later, Liberia’s electricity rules would indeed operate around a 50-hertz system and regional interconnection.
But winning a battle and winning a war are very different things. Because even while I was celebrating what I regarded as confirmation of the national direction, another problem was growing around us.
By then, the broad direction of the Master Energy Recovery and Development Plan was widely known. CAED itself was no longer being discussed with me, but proposals continued arriving from other directions. Government officials were bringing forward their own prospective Independent Power Producers.
Power Purchase Agreements were being floated. LEC was being pressed to consider proposals that had not necessarily originated with LEC or been evaluated within the framework we were trying to establish.
That brought me back to the same problem in another form. I was not opposed to Independent Power Producers. The Master Plan anticipated them. Liberia needed private capital. We certainly did not possess the money to rebuild the electricity sector ourselves. The issue was never whether private companies should participate.
The issue was: Who was directing Liberia’s electricity policy? Were private proposals being evaluated against the national strategy? Or was the national strategy expected to bend every time another politically connected proposal arrived?
One such proposal came through the Minister of Finance, John Bestman. Because the Ministry of Finance controlled LEC’s purse strings, I was under considerable pressure to take the proposal seriously.
From where I sat, financial authority seemed to be intruding into a technical and policy decision that properly belonged within the electricity-sector framework. Eventually, we could no longer leave our disagreement unstated. We wrote Minister Bestman setting out our objections. It did not gain us any favors.
And that is where the optimism I carried out of President Taylor’s office began colliding once again with the reality waiting outside it. The President had just agreed with what I regarded as one of the fundamental principles of our long-term strategy.
Yet around him, competing electricity proposals continued to move. And I found myself confronting a question that was becoming larger than electricity: What is the purpose of appointing people to positions of responsibility if they are not allowed to exercise that responsibility?
I had begun this episode with one of my own lieutenants telling me something I did not particularly want to hear.
Ed Sharpe had said: “This meeting will be no different.” I disagreed with him. But I listened. And because I listened, I walked into the President’s office carrying something I had not intended to carry. That document produced one of the most consequential decisions I believed we had achieved since Ron Quist and I began developing the Master Energy Recovery and Development Plan.
The irony would not have been lost on me. Perhaps Presidents needed their lieutenants for exactly the same reason. Not simply to agree. Not to discover what answer the President wanted and then provide it. But to understand the responsibilities entrusted to them, exercise their professional judgment and, when necessary, tell the man who appointed them something he might not particularly want to hear.
By June 11, 1999, that question was weighing heavily on me. So I sat down again. Eleven days after requesting an exclusive tête-à-tête with President Charles Ghankay Taylor, I wrote him my third letter. Its title was:
USING YOUR LIEUTENANTS WISELY
