Squatters, with no legal rights, but with permits

After yesterday's post about Kru Town, I was interested to read this article about sea erosion in West Point, which is said to be home to around 75,000 residents, most of whom, among other challenges, have highly insecure rights to their property: 

Mary B said she had bought the piece of land from the commissioner of the township for 11,500 Liberian dollars, about 130 dollars,and built her shop on it. 

According to the Township Commissioner's office, residents in the area are primarily squatters, with no legal rights to the land though it is possible to obtain a Squatters Permit from the administrative office, which grants a certain level of legitimacy to the dwellers.…West Point is home to many of Monrovia's disadvantaged people and many cannot afford the city's huge rents, which are fixed in U.S. dollars - 150 for a modest two bedroom apartment. To make matters worse the government does no have public housing available. 

People in the area have always talked about plans by the government to relocate them, but the Public Works Ministry says the government has no such plans to move over 75,000 people.

I've never heard of buying a squatters permit, but that hardly means such things don't exist or aren't actually codified legally in Monrovia or elsewhere, but the Commissioner's statement that the dwellers have no legal rights, just a vague "certain level of legitimacy" is hardly reassuring. 

The Original Two Monrovias

Kru Town, 1932 by Paul Julien. As posted on the Liberian Observer. 

This upcoming exhibit has been written about elsewhere, most notably at Liberia Past and Present, where Fred adds some interesting context to the unique and itinerant Dutch Liberiophile Paul Julien, who seemed to be a particularly curious and observant fellow, just the sort of witness to the footnotes of history that could be hoped for, such as this under-documented era of Liberia's history.

I was particularly intrigued by his remarks about the contrast the indigenous settlements so close to Monrovia with the mannered and increasingly prosperous hilltop capital. From his comments on the juxtaposition of Krutown, which was situated approximately where the Freeport is today, and the central city:

Paul Julien visits Krutown and describes it as being in a "sharp contrast to Monrovia, of which it is not even two minutes walking distance away. [It] consists completely of square huts with grass thatched roofs. It is obviously situated on the shore, with a wide sandy beach separating it from the surf." 

When comparing the two he makes sure the Belgian audience will understand what he means, by relating to what they should know. "Up, in Monrovia, the city still reminds one of a capital city, with streets and buildings that, even though only from afar, remind one somewhat of Europe." While in Krutown, "The narrow muddy alleys that wind in a marvelous disorder through the village are the set for the life of the coastal residents. Small naked youngsters run around in the sand.

It seems even in the pre-war era, the phenomenon of the Two Monrovias existed.  Julien's photographs and a film will be on display at the National Museum in July and August.

The Going Rate for Office Space in Monrovia Is...

…$385,000 per year?!

In what seems to occur with ever-increasing regularity, the Liberian government was exposed in a shocking headline, the boldface type squeezed together to fit in all the zeros. Such an eye-popping figure jumped out of the latest j'accuse on one of the most recent controversies: the Liberia Telecommunications Agency supposedly signed a multi-year lease for a newly-built office compound in Congo Town, priced at $1,155,000.

How could any property, no matter how grand, command such a price in the world's fourth-poorest country? But the seven-figure phalanx is only the most densely-formed particular of the tale, which perfectly reflects both the artifice and the reality of this city’s social and political transacting.

Monrovia, like many African cities, is a place where astronomical real estate prices, rivaling office and residential rental rates in American cities, spike above a dismal landscape of unlit, unplumbed $10-per-month rooms, home the vast majority of the city's residents. The elite amalgamation of government, philanthropy and diplomacy, which is meant to serve these desperately poor people, sprays enormous volumes of expenditure, not towards their desperate constituents below, but high aloft into this stratosphere, above the zinc roofs and over the walls into the freshly-finished, $3,000 per month sea view apartments and quarter-million-dollar per year office compounds.

Another gated compound. Photo courtesy FrontPageAfrica.

What makes the situation, if not worse, than at least politically expedient, is these huge windfalls are initially captured by the tiny foreign commercial class, whether Lebanese, Syrian, Spanish, Chinese, Egyptian, Turkish, or American. Only secondarily does this non-citizen strata remit the ultimate rent to the Liberian elite: most of whom are currently or recently in government. It is not just a fact but a common practice that many of the tenants and ultimate landlords are one and the same. It is no wonder, then, that for decades and decades the Liberian government is constrained of office space, and must perennially turn to the private market to find suitable accommodation, and must pay the prevailing price.

The LTA saga casts all the usual characters precisely in this reinforcing relationship: the quasi-regulatory agency, headed by a returnee with an only-famous-in-this-town last name; the landlord-builder, not Liberian but a semi-mysterious, Chinese firm with a participation rate in the post-conflict boom that dubiously prolific, who together strike a deal for one of the plethora of "Upstairs Buildings" which have risen up across Monrovia since 2006 by the dozens.

Then, there are the brass tacks: the sums, the numerals, the commas, the zeros. And why not? It is a difficult country, hard to secure land, hard to build, hard to wait for a return on investment. Hard to trust someone. So it's the logic of the market, the invisible hand(s). It is the fee that is commanded. Who’s to say if it is a waste? There is no alternative.

And so, in one of the few remaining countries in the world where the GDP works out to less than one dollar per person per day, a million dollars doesn't buy you very much: a few years at your appointed office, high aloft with a view to the ocean, the air-conditioning floating down from the wall-mounted unit, relentlessly holding back the tropical heat outside the walls. After a few seasons, time is up, the keys are turned over, and it is someone else's turn to pay fictitious lease rates, and feel the artificial air soothe their skin.

The rent is so like that man-made cold air. It doesn't last long, and has to be relentlessly replaced. As soon as the machine is shut off, the oppressive heat outside leaks through the cracks. Like that cold, the rent is gone; it’s floated away into the atmosphere.

The Problem is not the Pehn-Pehn

"These guys are like suicide bombers," my Liberian friend sighed from behind the wheel as our car slowly made our way through central Monrovia recently. Outside of our vehicle, an kamikaze-like swirl of motorbikes flitted within inches of our car, seeming to bounce off the fenders of the vehicle in front. Any gap between cars of more than a few feet was ample territory to be conquered, and was soon filled with buzzing bikes.  In what has become a typical scene on Monrovia's streets the motorbikes, known locally as pehn-pehns (or pen-pens), for the sound of their endlessly repetitive bleating horns, created a chaotic choreography set to their own cacophony, making the movement of the car down the block stressful and difficult.

Pehn-pehns have never been widely beloved among Liberians, but seem to be particularly loathed by those Monrovians who have the luxurious option of moving around by private vehicle. Even among Liberians who take pehn-pehns regularly, pehn-pehn operators are held somewhere between a head-shaking disregard and a teeth-clenching outrage. There seen as lawless, senseless. Although the streets of many African cities swarm with motorbikes, they are a particularly notable feature of Monrovia, a city whose contemporary crowding seems most noticeable in three expects: its sprawling suburbs, its overstuffed slums, and its standstill street traffic.

As Monrovia's economy has burgeoned in the last few years, the capital's once-potholed and empty main roads, now smoothed over with recent tarmac, have filled with vehicles, resulting in crawling congestion during daylight hours, particularly during an increasingly-epic rush hour along the city's spine, Tubman Boulevard, from the city's eastern residential fringe into the commercial center. While these jams pale in comparison to the legendary Lagosian go-slows or Accra's dawn-to-dusk parking lots, in the last few years have Monrovians partaken in that most mundane of moans: complaining about the endless traffic.

Partly, geography is to blame: stretched across a long peninsula, Monrovia now spills across the swampy plains to its north and east. Connected by a single road, the city is poorly-equipped to handle commuter traffic from its historic central area to the now-burgeoning suburban areas such as Paynesville and Duazohn, which stretch for as much as twenty miles from the heart of the city. The traffic problem worsens each month as each container ship full of cars unloads at the city's Freeport, and has grown noticeably worse, somewhat ironically, with the addition, starting last year, of a series of low-function traffic lights at major intersections along Tubman's length, which seem to ensure bottlenecks along the city's single street.

Packs of Pehn-pehns dart dangerously through this traffic, riding the double-yellow line down the center of Tubman as if they were merely inches wide, "playing chicken" with oncoming traffic as they rush head-on towards a line of side-view mirrors. There's no question its dangerous and annoying.  It's also envy-inducing to see travelers zipping past standstill vehicles, their ride costing less than a dollar.

Much is made in the press about the background of pen-pen drivers, most of whom are young and male. I've read countless press reports that declare pehn-pehn riders to largely ex-combatants, or mostly foreigners from Nigeria, or criminals. Speculation that drivers are drunk or high are frequently voiced-who knows if its true. I've never seen any survey statistics to back this up, much less a count of just how many pen-pens operate in Monrovia, although the riders are organized into a union.

What's less disputable is that pehn-pehns, despite their dangers and annoyances, constitute an essential form of affordable transportation for a great number of Monrovians, and are therefore an irreplaceable component of the transport infrastructure of a fast-growing city where there are few forms of public transport. Even if Liberia's National Transit Agency doubled the fleet of Indian-donated buses that ply Monrovia's streets, pehn-pehns would remain a vital form of transport for the vast majority of the city. The result is an inverse relationship between their irreplaceability and the scorn they engender.

The demographics of the drivers aside, an unaddressed issue in the loathing the pehn-pehns bring, is that their role in the city's transport system has not been formalized and integrated thoughtfully. The placement of traffic lights at many intersections has further impeded traffic movement; many big intersections are crowded and impassible not necessarily because of the volume of automobiles, but due to curbside taxi and pehn-pehn parking areas, where commuters switch between shared taxis and motorbikes to continue their journey. These intermodal zones are not officially designated or set aside, and so slowing taxis and rows of parked motorbikes block a lane, causing cars to squeeze by.

Image courtesy FrontPageAfrica 

Authorities in Liberia have often taken an adversarial approach to the pen-pen drivers and their representatives, seeming to transform the general public's dislike into draconian (and vague) regulations. In the last few years, the government has imposed a series of increasingly-aggressive restrictions on pen-pen movement, of which last week's sudden ban is the most severe. In 2011, the Liberian National Police imposed a night-time curfew for motorbikes, supposedly in to thwart armed robbers from their get-away vehicles of choice. Perhaps surprisingly, this curfew has held.

"Our biggest problem is motorcyclists. The Motorcycle Union is growing almost every day. You have new riders coming on the streets every day, and many of them are not trained. They do not understand the traffic rules, and they don't want to protect themselves," --Minister of Transport Tornorlah Varpilah, October 29th

In a city still mostly devoid of formal or even informal employment opportunities for the undereducated youth of the city, hopping behind a pehn-pehn and immediately collecting 20 or 50 LD per ride is an all-too-rare means to find enough to eat rice each day, if not a rung on the ladder to any kind of economic self-sufficiency.

I've had my run-ins with pehn-pehns, quite literally: for every 18 months that I've lived in Monrovia, I've had a motorbike crash into my car, sometimes while I was driving. No one has been hurt, thankfully, but the aftermath of each has been a highly unpleasant confrontation in which I was threatened with physical violence and monetary pay-offs were demanded, even though it wasn't my fault that my vehicle was hit and damaged. I wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone. Nearly every car trip in the city features an aggressive encounter with a motorbike, whether a close cut-off or near-collision. It is this disregard for the rules of the road that partly explains the widespread disdain for pen-pen drivers, but equally, I think, is the class distinction between the possibly-ex-rebel drivers and the rest of the public, be they office workers or ministers. Many Liberians abhor disorderliness, which the risky, careless motorbikes seems to embody.

I am fully supportive of regulations for the motorbikes, including those that are being debated this week: ensuring that drivers are licensed and trained, that helmets are worn, and safe driving is practiced. But this latest edict, effectively outlawing most journeys by motorbikes, seems not so much an attempt to improve safety but to rid Monrovia's auto lanes of a pestering annoyance of having to share the road with pehn-pehns. This has its connotations in the canyon-like class divides in this city, where the better-off openly disdain their poverty-stricken fellow citizens, who struggle to get by. Rather than decreeing that motorbikes (and the people that operate them and reply on them) disappear, Monrovia would be better off if it developed a comprehensive plan to carve out dedicated space for the city's motorbikes, and their users, and recognized how both are vital and beneficial to this city and its residents.

British Embassy Reopens

The United Kingdom has re-opened its Embassy in Monrovia this week, after it was evacuated and closed in 1990 at the early stages of the Liberian Civil War. From The New Dawn: 

"I also just want to reiterate the importance that the United Kingdom attaches to the relationship with Liberia", the British Minister stated during the ceremony held at the new British Embassy in Sinkor.A Foreign Ministry release says Mr. Simmonds disclosed that there are only a few numbers of embassies the UK Government is opening across the world, and that his Government wanted to make sure that Liberia was one of those:"So, this is a significant step for the United Kingdom. I'm delighted to be here, I'm delighted to dedicate this new British Embassy".He added that his government will be encouraging more UK businesses to invest in Liberia which would contribute to the economic development and growth that is taking place in Liberia.In response, Foreign Minister Ngafuan hailed Britain's contributions to the bilateral ties between Liberia and Great Britain as he recalled Britain's historic recognition of Liberia's independence as the first country to do so.The Liberian Foreign Minister remains certain that with the reopening of the British Embassy in Liberia the British government will now put on its front-burner the issuance of British visas here, something the British Minister himself acknowledged in his speech delivered Monday night at the Royal Grand Hotel in Sinkor.Counting other efforts by the British government that have helped to enhance Liberia-British relations, Minister Ngafuan continued: "This year, we have been honored by two significant visits: one, by your Prime Minister, the Honorable Dave Cameron who came in February as a Co-chair of the UN High Level Panel of Experts to craft the Post-2015 development agenda and today, another high level visit from you.""The fact that you didn't have an embassy here; we felt that we needed to bridge that gap. And now we are very happy that you've responded and we have a physical presence of Great Britain in Liberia", Minister Ngafuan stated.He named the resumption of flights by British Airways to Monrovia, the operations of British businesses in Liberia and last year's Liberia-UK Business Forum that was held in London, the UK as some of the testimonies of the cordial relationship between both countries."

The new Embassy is not in the same location as the old one: As the article notes, Her Majesty's government now operates a mission in Sinkor, specifically the LCL Compound, a sparkling complex of three high-rise apartment towers on the beach between 12th and 13th streets, which is also home to the new Swedish Embassy, which moved in from a Johannsen location when the LCL Compound opened in 2012. The Knight of the Order of Malta's legation moved from another compound in Sinkor, and the three golden blocks house some of the most expensive apartments for lease in the entire city. So the new British Embassy is hardly a dedicated, purpose-built mission. 

The Former British Embassy on Mamba Point, the white building at the center against the concrete wall and curve of UN Drive, was later made the Ambassador's residence of the US Embassy.

Previously, the British Embassy had been part of Mamba Point's classic Embassy Row, situated on a beautiful, dramatic clifftop house just below the US Embassy, facing the ocean. The Dutch embassy was just down the street and the French Embassy was further up the hill at Benson Street.

1990-2000 era maps showing old UK Embassy location.

At some point after it was vacated by the British, HM Embassy became the Ambassador's residence in an expanded US Embassy compound. Today, the French and British embassies are located in the oceanside avenues of Sinkor, the US have moved across the street to the old Greystone compound, and the Dutch have yet to return, although the area still is home to most UN Agencies, the European Union, and the Vatican Embassy. 

Monrovia now hosts more than twenty embassies, consulates, and honorary consuls, although many Ambassadors accredited to Monrovia are resident in Abidjan, Accra, or even Abuja. 

Building of the Month: Pink Apartment Block

 ©2012 Matthew Jones.

I set these two photos aside from yesterday's post because I think they're actually two nice pictures, if I do say so myself, and of the many long-procrastinated ideas for this blog, I thought a 'Building of the Month' feature would be kind of fun. So here it is.

Obviously a pink building is strange anywhere, its implications of a certain juvenile femininity, perhaps, or even a twee tropical style. Whatever exuberance may have been intended or is possible to interpret is muted by the dark skies, pot-holed dirt boulevard and over-pruned tree. I see the resulting image as forlorn, in an unintentional way that compounds its melancholy. Some of Glenna Gordon's photos hold this aspect, such as this one, among others.

Tiling of buildings as a finish is common in Monrovia, as in other parts of tropical Africa, and the range of tiles that gets imported to Liberia (as with many categories of imported goods to West Africa) tends to be low-quality stuff from Dubai and China. In this example, I imagine these may have been more intended for bathroom interiors than multi-story façades. The builders obviously continued the theme with the paint job on the exterior wall ("fence") and elevated generator house. Note lastly the tinted glass windows, shaded much like the rain-heavy clouds, and balcony rails.

This building around Warren Avenue and 18th Street in Sinkor, went up through 2011-12 and is an example of the rapid in-fill on non-prime sites, away from the major streets and beaches, that have now experienced dense, high-end construction. This block  is now occupied, although I've never been inside and I think that ex-patriates from Asia, who may or may not be the building's owners, live there.

That Sinkor Feeling: The Two Monrovias

In babbling on about Monrovia's divergent real estate markets and how it is similar to, and different from, the phenomena in other African cities, it occurred to me that some visuals would help illustrate the on-going building boom in the city, which has been seemingly increasing in the last half-decade. I've previously run similar photoposts here (All Photos ©Matthew Jones). 

One of the taller towers going up, an 8-story tower on 8th Street and Gardiner Avenues, part of a larger, 4-building development going up in phases across the street, facing the beach. I think it's nearly complete now but it took about an extra year to get it finish. Whether by lack of capital or other construction constraints, delays like this are pretty common here and elsewhere in African real estate development.

The architectural plan of the same tower, showing the 2-apartments-per-floor layout. 

 

One of the more noticeable examples of the densification of Sinkor is on Payne Avenue at 19th Street near the side entrance to JFK, where two recently-constructed towers, mainly apartments but also the local of the iLab tech NGO, were joined this past dry season by a third building, bulging up in between the earlier two. 

While Mamba Point and the city center have fewer available lots, this tall building at the top of Sekou Toure Avenue, seen at the center. Sekou Toure, home of many of the UN Agency offices, is something of the Turtle Bay of Monrovia. And while most diplomatic missions have decamped from Mamba Pint to Sinkor, the US Embassy and EU Delegation compounds are still nearby, in addition to the perennial hotel, restaurant, and nightlife options of Mamba Point.

 

The Naresh Brothers Building, completed in early 2012, is right at the center of Sinkor, 15th Street and Tubman Boulevard. While the building doesn't have a pool, its balconies have great views across the city, and its across the street from the Royal Hotel as well as other restaurants and supermarkets.

Similarly hidden on a side-street of Sinkor, this building went up on 11th street near the beach in just a few months in late 2012. The area is still characterized by informal structures, vacant lots with old cars, and abandoned buildings housing squatters, including the former Ghanaian embassy building. Increasingly in the last few years, however, these corners of Sinkor have been transformed into walled compounds with multistory apartment blocks like this.

 The grandaddy of them all has to be the 3-tower beachfront complex between 13th and 14th streets. Now home to the Swedish and Knights of Malta diplomatic missions, reportedly the British mission is set to move here any day now when it is formally upgraded to a full Embassy. There's a massive pool and other typical amenities, although, like many compounds, there isn't much space for parking. I took this in 2012 when they were still going up, but the buildings have been complete for about 10 months now.

Moved 2 Maputo

I've never been to Mozambique, but earlier this summer, both the title and the subject matter of this entry to The Economist's Baobab blog, titled 'Moving to Maputo" both hit home. The topic was the increasingly-common phenomenon in African capitals, where international-standard residential properties (those that ex-pats find suitable) sell or rent for prices comparable to apartments and houses in international cities in Europe and North America:

A thriving expat community has developed around the university, but few Mozambicans can afford to live there. Rents have increased dramatically over the past four years; purchase prices have doubled. 

“The most common type of property has three bedrooms and we are talking about $3,000 per month onwards,” says Gonçalo Marques, a local estate agent. “You can find properties in prime areas for $7,000 per month. For purchase prices you’ll find that the same property might be sold for about $500,000—sometimes more.” 

The arrival of migrants from rural areas and abroad has pushed up demand for housing. Attracted by strong economic growth and a common language, highly skilled Portuguese migrants have been increasingly flocking to their former colony over the past two years, as their own economy remains ensnared in the euro crisis. Registrations at the Portuguese consulate in Maputo rose by 25% in 2012, and the trend is expected to continue. 

The cost of living in Maputo has surprised some migrants. “I live in the centre of Maputo. The centre of town is not very big and the rents are so high,” says Ana Oliveira, who moved to Mozambique from Portugal three months ago. “You need to share the apartment with three or four people.” Landlords have started to demand that tenants pay six months’ rent, or more, up-front.Many have relocated to neighbouring Matola, where housing is cheaper. But now prices in Matola are rising, too. “A property that was on the rental market there two years ago for $1,500 a month might now be on the market for $2,500,” says Mr Marques. 

As new residential developments reach completion, the situation could change. The construction sector, having stagnated for decades, started to pick up two years ago. Encouraged by rising prices, developers have piled into the market. 

But while overall prices may be dragged down, the new developments are targeted exclusively at high-end buyers. “The number of people that are able to buy a property worth $500,000 is small,” says Rui Carrito, head of the Portuguese construction company Soares da Costa in Mozambique. 

“What you need is small, cheap houses for the people but you don’t see anything like that.”Buying a home is all the more tricky because the value of the property cannot be used as collateral for a loan. Interest rates for personal loans—when they are available—are around 20%. Until prices come down and ordinary people gain access to financing, most Mozambicans will continue to struggle to get a foot on the property ladder.

Foreigners settling in Monrovia in the last decade have experienced similar astronomical price points for apartments with security and reliable utilities, even as supply has expanded constantly (there have been at least 20 new multistory apartment buildings added to Mamba Point and Sinkor in the past year). About $1,500 per month per bedroom is pretty standard, depending on the number of hours of electricity available, and perhaps the age and condition of the building (even lavishly-featured multi-story structures that are only a few years old often show the wear of the extreme climate and shoddy construction).

Like Maputo and other cities, Monrovia has two completely different real-estate markets, with a high-end catering to wealthy foreigners who expect the closest possible semblance to their accommodations back in Washington, New York, or London, and a local housing profile for Liberian nationals, which ranges from newly-constructed homes for those with sources of income to the innumerable informal structures which house the majority of the city's people, from the city center to its expanding edges. I struggle to call this a "market," due to the ubiquitous quagmire of land ownership uncertainties, disputes and scandals, real estate purchases only happen at the suburban fringes of the capital. Hence, 'The Two Monrovias.'

Exasperating all of this, Monrovia suffers not only from the financial and judicial constraints of mortgage lending mentioned in reference to Maputo above, but also from a scarcity of land whose chain of ownership can be reliably verified. Finding a secure property to buy or lease is unusual for developers, squeezing supply and adding to costs. In my anecdotal observations, as prices for ex-pat style apartments and leases have skyrocketed in the last few years, some property disputes seem to have been solved, or at least, the owners have gotten their act together (whether simply returning to Liberia from abroad to facilitate the development of their property, or coming to an agreement in a family dispute to share revenue from a lease instead of endlessly arguing).

Monrovia remains a small market at the top end, with limited demand (which I don't see growing as the population of expatriates, and the presence of foreign NGOs and concession companies has stabilized), so it hasn't seen the prices of places like Lagos, Maputo, Accra or Luanda. I've long heard predictions of a price-crash when UNMIL leaves, I am not sure how much housing UNMIL or its personnel lease; and wonder if perhaps the rapidly-deteriorating earlier stock of multi-story structures will be priced for the secondary, local market instead of being upgraded again for ex-pats.

Moved 2 Moscow

The Economist's Baobab column from April this year chronicled and compared the comically centipedal convoys of many African heads of state. Its worth reading in full, and its point that such motorcades are both over-cautious and an unwise expenditure of aid-dependent governments. President Sirleaf's motorcade was picked out in particular: 

ON A recent Tuesday evening, President Ernest Bai Koroma's motorcade swung past St Mary's supermarket in the west of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown. A motorcyclist came first. Mr Koroma followed in a Mercedes saloon. Most of the other six vehicles in the procession were gleaming black 70 Series Toyota Land Cruisers. The 70 Series wagon starts at $68,210. The World Bank puts Sierra Leone's GDP per capita at $325. 

Mr Koroma's extravagant motorcade is modest compared with other African leaders. When Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni travels up-country he takes between eight or nine cars, a couple of mine-resistant South African armoured personnel carriers and a large silver Mercedes truck with a mobile lavatory. Occasionally mobile-phone signal dies when he arrives, suggesting that one of his vehicles also contains some kind of jammer. 

For a trip to church some weeks ago, the Liberian president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, travelled with three four-wheel-drives from the Special Security Service, two pickup trucks from the Liberian national police, and an off-roader carrying Nigerian troops from the United Nations peacekeeping mission. Long-time Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe travels with two motorcyclists up front who clear the road, arriving at high speed then stopping by their road, their lights flashing and sirens blaring. Three blacked-out Mercedes saloons follow, one with the number plate "Zim1". Finally two pick-up trucks appear, with ten or more armed guards in them. Which of these many cars Mr Mugabe himself travels in is unclear.

This wasn't the only time that Presidential Motorcades were mentioned in African-focused press during the same time frame. From the Brookings Institution Africa blog:

Likewise, President Banda has come to power with a lot of goodwill from home and abroad . But she must be careful not to follow the path of her predecessor. It is easy to squander such goodwill. President Banda must be very careful not to fall victim to the trappings of power. Last Friday (April 13, 2012), I was traveling around Lilogwe and I was stopped by police as the president’s motorcade passed through. The president’s limousine was surrounded by over 20 outriders, a large number armed cruisers and other vehicles as part of the president’s security detail. A very large convoy by any standards. While the president’s security is critical, there is no need to be extravagant. For a country that is heavily dependent on donors and one that is experiencing severe fuel shortages, such an image does not reflect a leadership that seeks to move away from the trapping of power that marked Mutharika’s regime. So, Your Excellency President Banda, as you rationalize the activities your government, start by getting rid of some of those vehicles in your motorcade.

These long motorcades may or may not be overblown or overbudget. That point is not, to me, the most detrimental effect of these long motorcades. This is not just a contingent of cars moving down the road, after all. This is a heavily armed caravan, with sirens whining and guns drawn, rushing at high speed down the highway at all hours, requiring (and sometimes forcing) other vehicles and citizens out off the road and out of the way, a repugnantly aggressive tactic that has lead to at least one death in the past year, when a Presidential Escort struck and killed a pedestrian in Paynesville in July. Traffic laws, as little as they are celebrated in Liberia, are not applied here. 

This is a daily, or multi-daily occurrence, often during rush hour, or other periods of heavy traffic, which have become increasingly constant in the last several years as roads have improved and more people have bought cars. The only relief is during the President's frequent visits to other countries. 

President Sirleaf is not alone in skipping the gridlock. The Vice President has an only slightly smaller, slightly less-armed motorcade to and from his residence in distant Paynesville. But any time the President gets in a car, space is made for her movement. As you may notice from some of these videos, the grand finale of this show, along with various Special Security guards, UNMIL troops, as the Economist mentioned, are a random assortment of SUVs with the bright red government plates, or just regular business and private plates, or NGO plates, which may or may not have been part of the convoy at the beginning, but just may be tagging along to skip the traffic. All it seems to take is a big helping of the old "look like you belong" behavior and pressing the hazard button of the dashboard for some flashing lights. In the montage below, notice the yellow (business)-plated grey SUV tailing the last police escort as it rushes through ELWA. The last video is from when Sirleaf and the aforementioned Malawian President Banda attended church together on the Sunday during her official state visit to Liberia, also in April: 



This seems to be the precipice of a slippery slope which Liberia's motorists are now happily sliding down. In the past year, a proliferation of impromptu motorcades seems to appear almost daily. National Police vehicles now routinely travel with their sirens sounding, rushing at high speed into on-coming traffic. Perhaps they have pressing business, but perhaps they are just making (ab)use of their privilege. Any government plate (such as the black Representative plate in the first video below) is a license to instantly enter motorcade mode: hit the flashers and cross the yellow line into the opposite lanes of traffic, or at least, as in the examples below, have other motorists show you undue deference even if you stay on the right side of the road: 



This practice has become an everyday occurrence, and there is no way of knowing whether there has been any official sanction for these Make-Your-Own-Motorcades, or whether this method is authorized, but its frequency seems inversely proportioned to the increase in gridlock traffic on Tubman Boulevard, and are a rather dispiriting display of public servants and regular citizens finding was to flaunt the law, the rules, and dilute social norms. 

Its starting to feel a bit like the ridiculous circus that is the gridlocked Moscow, which has become infamous for the proliferation of special flashing blue lights (which come with immunity from traffic laws) can be purchased by business men and other private citizens to whip past stalled lanes of mere mortals.  Maybe Monrovia needs its own Society of Blue Buckets. But it'd be nice if this society would move away from the chaos of Moscow rather than speeding head-on toward it, and it would be better if the elites in and out of government weren't imitating oligarchs.