Ebola has caused Liberia’s cauldron of dissatisfaction to boil over

Friday, August 22, 2014
By Paul Martin

Relations between the Liberian state and its citizens were already in crisis before the Ebola outbreak made things much worse

by Robtel Neajai Pailey
TheGuardian.com
Friday 22 August 2014

“We dodged bullets during the war, now Ebola is going to kill us?” my aunt asked me in distress one evening in mid-July, as we sat commiserating at my house on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital.

Back then, Ebola seemed like a looming threat in the way that armed conflict had 15 years earlier. But by the end of the month, the Liberian government had declared a state of emergency and, days later, the World Health Organisation designated the Ebola outbreak in west Africa an international health emergency. Ebola has now killed more than 1,000 people, with the number of deaths in Liberia surpassing those in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Yet before the highly infectious disease permeated Liberia’s borders from neighbouring Guinea in March, the country was plagued by a crisis of citizenship. Relations between the Liberian state and its citizens were already volatile.

Before Ebola hit, a group of disaffected citizens clashed with riot police at the Mittal Steel concession area in Nimba, north-central Liberia, in early July as they protested that an iron ore concession agreement had not benefitted local people. The government branded the assailants “thugs” and “unlawful”, making appeals to parent company ArcelorMittal before a formal investigation of the grievances.

This was the beginning of the bubbling cauldron. Ebola simply tipped the pot over.

The Rest…HERE

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