By Moses Uneh Yahmia and Alfred P. B. Kiadii |
Crisis in Monrovia! Crisis in Robertsports! Crisis in Greenville! Crisis in Gbarnga! Crisis in Vonjama! Crisis in Tubmanburg! Crisis in Buchanan! Crisis in Kakata! Crisis in Harper. And crisis everywhere! 320 days in leadership have turned into a tragic drama and scandal of monumental height. Blight is all over. Hurrah has turned into crying. Grimaces have become an official expression on the faces of the people. The masses feel betrayed, duped and scorned. The whole nation is united in shock, awe and disbelief.
Anarchic is the order of the day. Incompetence is the new normal. The nation is disfigured in a wailing odyssey. Ruins have taken over Monrovia. Filth greets you in the face.
Sewage are overflowing and popping waste. In Waterside it is appalling, on Gurely Street it is awful, and on Center Street it is a catastrophe. The whole affair is a horror film. And Brutalized is the people at the hands of all vices and evils. And Awkward is the state of affairs as officials of the Weah government jockey for quick wealth and instant gratification while the whole people live in conditions akin to prehistory, and suppressed by the ruling clique whose foremost focus is to frustrate the task of social emancipation by dominating, exploiting and oppressing the popular masses and the whole oppressed classes in the republic.
Businesses have hit rock-bottom and folded up. Insolvency is their deafening chorus. Even dishing out cheap credit and loan capital, characteristic features of the capitalist social system, is nonexistent. The economy is stagnated, in a down spiral, and in grotesque inertia. The Lone Star ceases to flutter over the landscape. The National Anthem inspires zero confidence. The battle hymn—the Lone Star Forever—has turned into its tragic opposites: dirge, requiem and ballad. Violated, brutalized, dishonored, humiliated, and milked are the republic and the people— oh, oh—there stand Weah and his parasitic cabal and Middle East shopkeepers basking in the spoils and booty.
The nation is the sick man of the world. The nation is a desolate wasteland. The nations suffered from the paradox of plenty. The whole affairs of governance has been relegated into the abyss. Statecraft is synonymous with scandal. One scandal after another, one blunder after another, one aberration after another, and one sordid affair after another—there stand the Liberian society!
Nowhere is governance synonymous with anarchy; nowhere has statecraft being trapped in its own vise; Nowhere has plunder becomes so brazen and obvious; Nowhere has mediocrity becomes the defining attributes of governance; nowhere is political leadership redolent to the law of diminishing marginal return; Nowhere there is so much indifference from those who preside over the state than in Liberia.
The homeland is passing through a difficult period. An epoch which is best characterized as a society ravaged by inner contradictions which could lead to an eruption of devastating effect. The once ‘Grain Coast’ which was looked at with envy and alarm by the Europeans, especially the Portuguese sailor Pedro de Cintra in 1461, is in a throes of crisis that threatens to tear the society apart.
At the head of this destabilizing campaign of the country is the rotten Weah government. An emergent bureaucratic bourgeoisie of the vulgar and most despicable type which hedges it bet on the national treasury, utilizing the vice of corruption, pillage and swindle to accumulate capital and amass wealth. It is a lousy coalescence and trashy stampede of lumpens and economic vultures who have set out on a mission to bleed the republic and relegate the popular masses to the lot of slavery and degradation. This phase in the historical development of the republic can be summed up thus: an in glorious era of shameful bankruptcy, economic immobility and social inertia.
The regime represents a recrudescence into the state of nature or the periods of savagery and barbarism where life was short, brutish and nasty. It is reminiscent of the ‘dark ages’ where historical development and the forward progress of society was in a complete ruins and visited with a scourge which inflicted pain and agony, thus leading to the destruction of the productive forces. As it can be nothing less than such imagery, as the death rate in the homeland has hit record highs. Men and women are dropping dead as a result of hunger and curable diseases that cannot be cured by government-run hospitals due to shortage of medicine, poor facility and service.
But the regime itself is a lousy caricature of the ancient regime of the True Whig party, dastardly replicating the arrogance of the erstwhile rotten oligarchy in manner that is so nauseating, and reduced the masses of the people to the status of helots. The Liberian leader, extravagant and incompetent in every respect and inferior and senile in every sphere, is an illiterate despot who has taken pleasure in an easy way out: easy woman, easy money and easy fortunes. He and his greedy gang of officials are impeding the economic development of the space. They are gobbling up and buying up the best places in the city center and on the outskirt of Monrovia, building haciendas while the people live in favelas, exuding with the childish arrogance of a medieval overlord presiding over a fiefdom, taxing the people in order to nurse the bloated wage bill of the regime.
Each minister is a cunning rascal; each junior minister is a pathetic scoundrel; each official has turned into economic pirate; each legislator is a lackey of the president, and almost each justice is a puppet of the president.
Again, a disillusioned comrade who departed the homeland in protest of the anarchy, social rot and economic banditry that are the key features of the homeland uttered a fitting epitaph of the regime, which within two years will be destroyed: “Do you want to know my take on this regime? It is that the more I analyze the characters who are governing the homeland, the more I get discourage about never returning to it. It is a shame and a scandal of colossal height to see the land of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Albert Porte, Juah Nimley, Du Fahnbulleh collapsing in the nasty gutter and these wretched hoodlums presiding over it are content with such filth. Until the homeland is led by a leader who is not interested in the blue-light convoy and the trappings of power, the nation will remain at inertia.”
These characterization of the republic and the regime are no lousy overstatement but an appropriate description of the chaotic state of affair that is engendering social disadvantages and exacerbating the crushing trilogy of poverty, disease and ignorance that are taking a joyful revenge on the Liberian people and keeping the republic at the lowest rung of global comparison of development indices.
We have written and spoken about the growing pitfalls and cleavages, but our outcries have fallen on deaf ears. We have called the attention of the president and his slavish lieutenants to these anomalies, but our admonition for a better society have made us to be slapped with the tag of ‘enemies of the state.’ We have asked the regime to exhibit elementary decency, but what we have been fed with is indecency on steroids. We have brainstormed and offered solutions but they have been consigned to the trashcan.
Every act of plunder that ingenuity and greed could formulate have been rollout by the bandit Weah and his horde of lowlifes. These elements are men of all crimes, serial plunderers and rotten savages who are united in theft, kleptocracy and plunder. Right before our eyes L$16 billion got missing and yet still remains the mystery of the age. US$ 25 million has been plundered by rogue Weah and his criminal enterprise. Yet the president has purchased a private jet which is docked in Senegal. When we raise the red flag on these crude bestialities and economic savageries, we are treated to the theater of the absurd of Jamaica Resort Tabernacle of Praise, where shortsighted Weah dabbles in ecclesiastical apostasy and naked blasphemy, complete with gory spectacles.
Even when the masses of the people decided to exercise their democratic rights in the last two by-elections in District # 13, Monsterrado and Sinoe Counties, they were bullied and brutalized by cocaine-infested thugs led by the flunkey call Jefferson T. Koijee. Citizens of District # 13 were visited with excruciating pain simply because they were certain to give the ruling party a political bloody nose. By contrast, the people of Sinoe County were robbed of their democratic verdict through a massive vote rigging for the candidate of the CDC. With these gross machinations, the regime is bent on not upholding the elementary rubric of democracy.
People are disappearing and the rate of suicide is alarming. Just in 11 months, there have been more reports of suicide now than in the recent or distant past. The chief cause of such death, ranges from hardship, poverty and economic menace. On top of it all, Abraham Roberts was busted when he illegally tried to bury two fresh dead bodies drizzling with fresh blood. Up till now, he roams the streets of Monrovia as a free man.
The armed defenders of the republic live in ruins and filth while Weah and his parasitic cabal bask in comfort and luxury. The wages of the armed protectors have remained stagnant and has plummeted considering the frontal assault on real wages by inflation and declining living standards. Their wage is as irregular as it is paltry. To make matter worse, the cost of living in the country is at an all-time high.
The republic has plummeted into a drug den. It is gradually becoming a citadel of the drug trade in West Africa. Our diplomatic passport is becoming an instrument of dishonor as Weah has distributed it to his black money friends. The nation is racing against time to become a narco state next to Guinea Bissau.
These scandalous aberrations have generated social problems. Some of our sisters who cannot withstand these shocks have fallen victim to the temptations of easy money by taking a vocation in prostitution. Similarly, some of our brothers have also fallen to the temptations of easy money and easy fortune by engaging in retrograde sexual conduct.
Do elements of the ruling clique think the people will be docile and lethargic forever? Will not a cry of horror, indignation and disenchantment transformed into the battle cry of nationalism and patriotism, which will motivate them to put an end to such national disgrace? Will the people not asked the questions: for whom must we bear or these brunt; what is this for? Are we daft to be treated this way, to allow ourselves to be so treated like canon fodders? Suffice it to mean that throughout history the dialectics of lordship and bondage has always transformed into revolt and resistance.
Matters are coming to a head. The masses are reading and asking questions. Reading the mood in the society, students are in the forefront of the struggle, putting the regime on trial and exposing its utter bankruptcy. The mood is hitting boiling point and Monrovia will erupt into an explosion either leading to the transformation of the country or the destruction of the contending tendencies.
Comrades, today, we are at a crossroad, a choice between two polar opposites: either the victory of Weah, along with his legion of swindlers—the complete destruction of the country and all its values and whatever that resembles progress and transformation. Or the victory of the popular classes which is ultimately the victory of the whole people and an entry into that future where art, culture, philosophy and science will flourish due to the progressive development of the productive forces, ushering that period where the people will master nature and contribute to the advancement of sacred human causes.
Yes, yes and yes, out of the abyss of mystery of this era is the development side by side of a new superior social system as manifested in the rising consciousness of the people. An era when men will leap from prehistory to an epoch of freedom and abundance is on the horizon. But this epoch will not come on the spur of the moment, not without struggle and resistance, not without a fight against the bankrupt ruling clique and its arch-defenders, not without an antagonistic struggle against outmoded institutions and social taboos. This victory will be soaked in blood and iron, in defeat and out of such defeat will emerge victory! Such defeat or victory are two different sides of the same coin and thus: struggle or perish—there is no third way!
Let your battle-cry be—down with George M. Weah, up with the popular vanguard and all of the fighting forces in the homeland!
Moses Uneh Yahmia and Alfred P. B. Kiadii are graduates of the University of Liberia. Kiadii studied Political Science and Public Administration while Yahmia studied Political Science and Economics. They can be reached via moseswyalc@gmail.com and bokiadii@gmail.com
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