MONROVIA – The Liberian People’s Party (LPP) has bowed in what it calls “revolutionary salute” to its former standard bearer, Dr. Togba-Nah Tipoteh, as the veteran economist, politician, and pan-Africanist marks 85 years of life, struggle, and service – declaring that the man affectionately known in progressive circles as “Comrade TNT” is “not just an individual” but “a chapter in Liberia’s history.” In a statement signed by its Acting Assistant Secretary for Press and Publicity, Darius David Sumo, the party celebrated the architect of MOJA, SUSUKUU, and the LPP itself as belonging to a generation that paid for democracy with exile, prison, dismissal, and deaths. THE ANALYST reports.
A Scholar Who Came Home
Tracing the journey of its two-time presidential candidate – who carried the party’s banner in the 1997 and 2005 elections – the LPP recalled a path that began at Saint Patrick’s and the College of West Africa and ran through Ohio University, Ohio State, and a doctorate in Economics from the University of Nebraska earned at the rare age of 27.
Rather than use those achievements to chase contracts or comfort abroad, the party noted, Tipoteh brought them home in 1971 and began contributing to Liberia and its ordinary people.
At the University of Liberia, he helped establish the College of Business and Public Administration and, as head of Economics, founded the Liberian Economic and Management Research Institute (LEMRI) to ensure that research solved real problems.
His critical boldness cost him his job on four separate occasions, the statement recounted, and four times student and faculty agitation forced his reinstatement – until, on the fifth, he walked out to serve the Liberian people directly.
SUSUKUU, MOJA, and the Mass Line
Invoking Mao Zedong’s Mass Line principle that development without the people is a fraud, the party recalled how Tipoteh in 1971 helped formulate SUSUKUU, a self-help, self-governing movement that told rural Liberians to use what they have to improve their condition.
From Grand Gedeh to Lofa, the LPP said, SUSUKUU became the most practical model of community development Liberia has ever seen, an idea that survived even an authoritarian state’s attempt to crush it.
Two years later, in 1973, he co-founded the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA) to raise political consciousness and challenge the status quo through nonviolent means, signaling that silence in the face of injustice is complicity.
In public service, the statement continued, he carried the same core message – center the poor, democratize the economy, respect the people – through roles as budget advisor to President Tolbert, Minister of Planning and Economic Affairs, chairman of the African Group of Governors at the World Bank and IMF, and senior United Nations advisor.
‘Erect, Unbroken, and Engaged’ at 85
Beyond economics and politics, the party celebrated the culture Tipoteh built – his African attire, his famed “Tipoteh slippers,” his baritone voice, and his deliberate return to his ancestral name, all declaring him a proud Liberian and African.
At 85, the LPP said, Comrade Tipoteh remains “erect, unbroken, and engaged,” still ready to fight because what he fought for has not been fully achieved: a legislature that alone receives US$53 million while the Liberian masses continue to live on less than US$2 a day, yet to become the drivers of their own development and controllers of their own resources.
Holding him up as the model of what an intellectual and leader must be – rooted in the people, guided by science, and committed to liberation – the party rededicated itself to the trajectory he charted: organizing the masses, speaking truth to power despite the backlash, and building a Liberia where dignity is not a privilege but a right.
“GW EH FEH KPI – the struggle continues,” the statement concluded, wishing the veteran a happy 85th birthday.