On Saturday, Liberia will be declared free from Ebola if no new infections are reported before then, the West African country having gone 42 days with no cases since it buried its last victim in March.

This represents twice the maximum 21-day incubation period for Ebola, counted from the last day when any person in the country had contact with a confirmed or probable case of the virus, in order to provide for a margin of safety.

“After almost 14 months spent under the cloud of Ebola, this will be joyful news for the country,” Karin Landgren, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy in Liberia told a rapt Security Council this week, in what may well be quite the understatement.

The country has had false dawns before and authorities are understandably cautious, but for Africa’s oldest black republic, it will be more than just an official announcement by the World Health Organisation (WHO). It would represent a triumph of momentous worth against human adversity, the horrors of which threatened the very existence of the modern-day Liberian state.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

It will also be a huge moment of redemption for president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated Nobel laureate who at the height of the outbreak had her very leadership credentials questioned, as analysts spoke darkly of a “social explosion”.

Few would doubt the toll this crisis has taken on her.