Sledgehammer Lady

They call her General Broh. Mary Break-it. Mary Burn-it. Mary Destroy-it. Don’t raze me, Broh, the sides of buildings plead. Mary Burn-it coming, oh! Mary Destroy-it. You see people running helter skelter. Taking the market, putting it on their head.  The acting mayor of Monrovia wants to clean up the slums and by her estimate, Monrovia is 70 percent slum. Today she wears a bright red and yellow jacket, sturdy sandals and long braids, gray at the hairline.  She looks formidable. She leads a group of people in fluorescent green raincoats armed with brooms along the Capital Bye-Pass, the area she’s chosen to target for her monthly clean-up.  “I’m not a sledgehammer lady. We’re not being cold-hearted, callous. We have to have proper land use,” she says. She is infamous for ordering the destruction of shanties perched on sidewalks and in wetlands, marking buildings that violate city ordinance number one with a giant orange X.  The city initially granted squatters rights but when Broh was appointed acting mayor by President Sirleaf she placed a moratorium on those rights. “They’d build concrete structures, permanent structures,” she explains.  At the same time she’s aggravated by the makeshift appearance of the art stands across from the US Embassy, one of which she demolished recently. “You can’t come and put two sticks together and call it a kiosk.”