In a strange twist

It is pouring even though we are in the middle of the dry season and the torrential rains for which Liberia is infamous aren’t supposed to begin for several more months. Yet I worry my 4x4 might float away. It was particularly hot today. I made the mistake of insisting Clara and I walk from my apartment to the Ministry of Public Works, where we were to interview the minister, Samuel Kofi Woods, a former student activist and human rights attorney, now enjoying his second ministry job in Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s government. We walked through the boiling heat as motorbikes and Mack trucks whipped by, exhaust and debris raining down on us. When we reached the ministry, I patted down my face with tissue, but the sweat had soaked through my tank top. Mercifully, Mr. Woods did not acknowledge it.  In a salmon-colored shirt and well-trimmed beard, a blue blazer and jeans, Woods looked more like a professor than a bureaucrat. His office was conscientiously spare. The only decoration was an 8x10 portrait of the president. He had traded in two leather chairs for wicker patio furniture. His work day begins at 7:30 a.m. “I believe new models for exemplary leadership become important,” he said.

As an elementary student, he’d dreamed of becoming a civil engineer. But he became an activist instead. His student movement had laid the groundwork for the military coup of 1980 that dethroned an oligarchy dating from the nineteenth century. The sitting President Tolbert and his cabinet were summarily executed, and a 27-year-old general in the Armed Forces of Liberia, Samuel Kanyon Doe, was put in power. Woods and his friends started agitating for the return of civilian rule. In 1991, at 17, he was thrown into jail for the first time. Discarding his civil engineering dreams, Woods settled on law school. “I thought as a victim I could transform a system of abuse into a vehicle for change,” he said. He was arrested many more times after that, and found it hard to say whether things were worse for him under Doe or under the warlord-turned-president, Charles Taylor. Under Taylor, he received death threats after his legal aid firm documented a massacre in downtown Monrovia. He went into exile in 1998 in Belgium and Ivory Coast.  In Belgium, he was charged with sedition; he was told his house would be ransacked and his daughter and her mother would be raped. He studied international law in the Netherlands and helped establish a special court in Sierra Leone to try Taylor for war crimes. It wasn’t until Taylor left in 2003 that Woods returned.

Newly-elected President Johnson Sirleaf named him Minister of Labor. “I felt it was time to get on the other side of the table – let them test my convictions,” he said. As the minister he worked to repeal a law dating from 1980 that prohibited strikes. He also facilitated the first union election at Firestone, the Akron, Ohio-based rubber company, in 80 years. The Steelworkers were so tickled they brought him to Vegas to give him an award.

As Minister of Public Works, his preoccupation has been roads. His theory is that roads will reduce poverty by allowing agriculturalists in Liberia's interior to more easily deliver their produce to market. The road he's most proud of leads to a prison camp in Yelle Bella, a camp where some of his fellow student activists were sent. "I spent five days and nights in the forest working to get to that prison camp," he says, beaming. Will he run for office in 2016? To this question, he takes the advice of veteran American journalist Mike Wallace, who interviewed him for "60 Minutes" in 2003. "I'll leave my options open," he says.