Memo to The President – Subject: Reach Out to Fellow Liberian VIPs and Stakeholders

Your Excellency,

You know better than we do that the task of obtaining the covetous UN Security Council Non-Permanent Member Seat is as critically daunting as it is historic. It is something we cannot afford to miss. It adds value to our national pride, and underscores the true end of conflict and war. It has the potential to reverberate our country’s legacy as a fighter for African liberation and defender of oppressed people around the world. That’s what we were yesteryears before tragedy of gigantic proportion visited us for 14 years. Sitting on the High Table of the United Nation’s Security Council again resituates us amongst the kings and queens of the world, not only assuring the global community of our comeback but also makes a new brand of our nation so that peoples of substance around the world chart a beating path through our doors.

As the head of our common state, the onus is upon you to rally the nation, particularly national stakeholders, your fellow VIPs, so that together and by and through all of you, the power with which Providence endowed Liberia can be maximally leveraged. By fellow VIPs, we refer to political leaders – bigwig Liberians like you – who carry much clout and respectability in the national and international arenas, with record of capability to make things happen at home and abroad. They also know and have their friends in New York and the capitals of the world who listens to them, and could be a lead-way.

Mr. President, when we speak about rallying your fellow stakeholders, we refer not to making ceremonious speeches, we rather refer to organizing and holding in-person roundtables at which those considered “political foes” – fellow Liberians who are actually brothers and sisters – will meet face-to-face, talk Liberian English and Liberian matters, and voiced out how they can assist your team enter the diplomatic realm to charm decision-makers and get the desired votes needed for victory.

Truth being told, you have done little or nothing since your incumbency one year ago to reach out to fellow VIPs, to deescalate the rhetoric spilling over from the raucous 2023 elections. In fact, you have hurt some of them. But it is during such dramatic and critically exhausting events like the one before us that can serve as a rallying point, a platform, and a uniting front of patriotic spirits with potential to heal exogenous and prohibitive factors. The die is cast, and it behooves you, only you, to step up, proving to be the national elder that you are by summoning all the human resources you can muster, especially including your fellow VIPs, to make the history.

Mr. President, Liberia is at a crossroad, and it would take the blessing, support and charm of all its fighting sons and daughters to put hands of deck. Thus, please come out of your partisan enclave. Call Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Call George Manneh Weah. Place a call to Alexander Cummings, and Beyoni Urey, and all the political leaders you can call. Better still, meet them in a roundtable. Talk matters over. Explore common solutions. And after, together, hit the UN Headquarters. Then, as the words of the National Anthem right says, “With heart and hand our country’s cause defending, we’ll meet the foe with valor unpretending,” and “with God above, our rights to prove, we will o’er all prevail.”