Ms. Johnson Sirleaf is the first woman elected president of an African country, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and arguably the most recognized leader on the continent. Rising from a junior bureaucrat, she became one of the few top Liberian officials not executed by firing squad during the 1980 military coup. From a jailed dissident in the 1980s, she became one of Newsweek’s 10 top leaders in the world.

But Ebola is threatening to derail that legacy. The epidemic has exposed crippling weaknesses in the public health system, decrepit infrastructure that has still not been dealt with more than a decade after the war, and endemic corruption that, despite Ms. Johnson Sirleaf’s protestations of “zero tolerance,” continue to characterize the interactions between Liberians and their government.

“The international community has arrived and is now seeing our backyard for the first time,” said Francis Dunbar, a former deputy finance minister who now supports Benoni Urey, a Johnson Sirleaf rival who was once a close adviser of Charles Taylor, the former president convicted of crimes against humanity. “The front yard is clean but the backyard is dirty.”

Karin Landgren, the United Nations secretary general’s special representative here, echoed a similar theme. “Ebola has shone a very harsh light on the many things that had not been done adequately. Very tangible things, like the health care system.”

With the global spotlight on Liberia, Ms. Johnson Sirleaf’s many domestic critics have found an international audience. Last month, the asthmatic daughter of Representative Edward Forh, a legislator, died after nurses refused to admit her until Ebola tests were run. Distraught, Mr. Forh took to the airwaves to denounce Ms. Johnson Sirleaf’s government, saying that the president was “surrounded by two groups of people: one group completely ignorant and the other group completely deceitful.”

But just last year, Mr. Forh’s colleagues in the Liberian Legislature voted to arrest one of the president’s allies for releasing a recording in which Mr. Forh suggested that public funds should be given to him in a kickback scheme.