MONROVIA – It seems President Jospeh Boakai has stepped into the cage most of his predecessors if not all were canned in—a barricaded enclave of a kitchen cabinet made often by a few bootlickers, lackeys and charlatans. This cabal of shrewd street-smart maestros (though the names and faces change one regime to another) often close the entire wild world on the country’s heads of state, leaving them tightly quarantined and sealed up from all other major stakeholders, including boni fade partisans, and made to play to their gallery only, as if Liberian leaders were their personal property. A Liberian lawyer, former Solicitor General, appears to see the incumbent president drifting into the catch of the cabal, and his sounding an alarm on how Liberians are enduring hellish conditions. In an open letter to President Boakai, Sayma Syrenius Cephus highlights the evolving tragedy and other vexing issues of state. The Analyst reports.
Former solicitor general of Liberia has asserted that after unshackling himself from turbulence and from the realms of silence, he wanted to be bold to tell President Joseph Nyuma Boakai “that the Liberian people are suffering.
“They’re catching hell but nobody wants to say it,” said the erudite Liberian lawyer stated in an open letter addressed to the Liberian president. “Things are so hard that there’s a state of gloom everywhere in our communities.”
Sayma Syrenius Cephus wrote: “I humbly urge you, Your Excellency, to look beyond the official news that is being provided you by your cabinet Ministers. Take a quiet trip around the city to see for yourself what I am talking about.
“Mr. President, nothing is working and from the look of things it seems that Liberia has been relegated to the abysmal paths of starvation, hunger and economic paralysis,” he continued.
“Recently, I heard on the radio that the road between Vahum and Yandomuellahum in Kolahun District, Lofa County is no more and so the citizens are trading with neighboring Sierra Leone. A stone throw away from the Executive Mansion is West Point, a squalid community whose residents are living wretched lives but are not captured in the national budget and so too is Soniwein. My home town of Woloken, Tiempo Statutory District, River Gee County will never get a glimpse of what the national budget supposed to do for West Point or Clara Town that is closer to the epicenter of power.”
Cephus indicated that Mr. President in all of this is unreachable, inaccessible and gradually becoming the ‘political property’ of few of his lieutenants who are using their positions and proximity to power to mock their fellow compatriots while the jobs for which they were appointed are left undone.
He urged the president to appoint the right people with the professional ingenuity to work for the country, saying “Liberians will celebrate you, but if you appoint people who see themselves first and foremost as Lofians, uncles, aunties, nieces and the likes, your government will become a subject of scorn and rejection.”
Cephus said he was afraid to say some of the president’s officials were driving him government in the wrong direction, noting that building a nation with a history of lawlessness requires tough decisions irrespective of whose interest is at stake.
He cited the instance of Liberia’s drugs crisis, indicating that the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency was going after users and not importers and producers.
“You need an Independent Counsel with the requisite training and experience backed by logistical support to carry out search, seizure and Rescue mission and to order or conduct random drugs tests where applicable,” he admonished the president.
The former solicitor general further stated: “I am afraid to say your government has lost the war on drugs with the constant suspensions and dismissals of officials at the LDEA before the actual war begins. There are no strategies and from the reports of constant suspensions and dismissals, it would seem we are using try and error methods in our drug war.”
He raised a number of other “troubling events”, including the denial by the Boakai government to pay his niece.
He explained the ordeal in the open letter: Excellency, upon your assumption of power, you earnestly took on tenure positions and in the hay of the rancors that followed, you suspended my niece Elizabeth Dorkin and other well-meaning Liberians. Others challenged the decision but in the case of my niece I advised her that you invoked your ‘pleasure power’ under Article 56 of the 1986 Constitution and therefore, she could only claim her contractual rights under Article 25 for the unexpired term of her tenure. Inasmuch as she was crying that she never had her ‘day in court’ I said frankly that your suspension order was sufficient notice but the truth is notice is simply a gist of due process.
“Since I have been unwilling and unable to criticize your government because I believe there’s more time to make amends, we ended up at the Supreme Court not challenging the suspension order but to mandate your government to pay my niece for the unexpired term. Excellency, it may interest you to know that even though we signed a stipulation agreement which was approved and later a letter was written by the Honorable Minister of Justice and Attorney General to support the payment stipulation agreement, nothing has happened.
“My niece has lost her job and her right to be paid in her own country and under a Liberian Government. What else is regional discrimination than this? This certainly is outside the ARREST AGENDA, and this short note is to challenge those who are using their proximity to you and their positions to hurt others.”
Cephus said while he was still unwilling and unable to criticize because he believes there’s still room for the president to make amends, he also warned that the time is now to carry out substitution in a number of agencies.
He added: “After all as you said to me before that ‘public service’ is not an entitlement and you repeated this statement recently at the investiture ceremony held at the Executive Mansion, I am pleading with you to reexamine the performance of your ‘Rescue Team’ and do the needful. This is my plea. Suspensions or dismissals are not the solutions to our problems of governance. I am certain that your appointees should be the reflections of the reconciliation that you are preaching.”