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same foreign investor, the Firestone Plantations Company, also
for a long time refused to accede to the demand to sell part of
its production to the Government, before finally giving in in
1976 (see Chapter 3). The inability of the Liberian Government
to attract investors who were willing to establish a steel
factory - or the failure to set up a steel factory itself - is
also significant in this respect. The same applies to the
logging companies which in practice could not be forced to set
up wood processing industries as was stipulated in their
concession agreements.
The companies' participation in the financing and realization of
a national educational programme or of a programme designed to
train manpower who (1) would meet the manpower needs of these
companies, and (2) would improve Liberia's capacity to exploit
its natural resources without these foreign investors, or with a
reduced number of them - though this would, of course, clash
with these companies' interests - was either non-existent or
symbolic. This even applies to the LAMCO J.V. and the Bong
Mining Company despite their previously mentioned remarkable
efforts in this field. The Firestone Plantations Company as well
as the other plantation companies still employ a vital number of
expatriates to perform the technical tasks necessary to continue
the companies' operations. To describe the relations with
foreign investors as "Partnership and Progress" is therefore, to
say the least, misleading. In the case of Firestone, for example,
the most important phenomenon approaching a reasonable concept
of partnership consisted of the rubber company's free
distribution of clones, the free advice given to Liberian rubber
farmers, and the buying of their product (rubber) - from which
primarily the political elite has benefited (see Chapter 13).
Likewise, "progress" as a characteristic of the Firestone -
Liberia relations refers to the company,'s advancement rather then
to an increasing exploitation of the country's potential to the
benefit of its inhabitants. The Liberian Minister of Finance,
Stephen A. Tolbert (1972 - 1975), himself an important rubber
plantation owner, defended his own and Firestone's interests when
in. 1975 during a meeting with educational experts of the World
Bank who insisted that Liberia whould accelerate its educational
efforts he said:
"(..,) but then - who is going to tap our rubber trees?" (5).
Yet there are more striking examples of the attitude and the
interests of the foreign investors - and the concept of their
role as shown by the Liberian political elite. As a consequence
of the absence of any Government policy with respect to
education and training of manpower, and given the efforts
undertaken by the mining companies there was, for instance, only
one mining engineer working at the Ministry of Lands and Mines,
Carney Johnson in 1977 (6). In this year the country's first
major mining company closed its gates after operating for almost
one third of a century in the country. Also at the end of the
197O's it was still not possible to study mining at a university
level in Liberia. Consequently, the foreign companies skillfully