MEMO TO THE PRESIDENT: Subject: With Poor Start in 2024, the New Year Could Be Better

Your Excellency:

Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Certainly, 2024 was not a good year for you. And for the whole of Liberia. You could have done better. Were you still on the bench as an observer, a private citizen or an opposition politician, you couldn’t have remained silent and inactive as 2024 rolled out and government performed. You won’t have liked to see Liberians scrapped off their jobs because they were partisans. You wouldn’t have liked to see a constitutionally and/or legally insolated jobs, such as tenured positions, revoked of their immunity by arbitrary presidential actions. You wouldn’t have liked to see or hear that the edict or opinion of the High Court of Liberia defiled, defied and disobeyed.

We say so or assume that you won’t have liked to see those weird developments take place without your action because we know that you are an experienced public servant, an elderly statesman, and a pragmatist, who desires good for Liberia and for Liberians, and would have risen up against anything and anyone that would jeopardize our country’s fledging democratic order, its nascent peace and the trajectory of transformation. Unfortunately, that’s not what we saw you prove to be in 2024. Though the year showed you in such a disappointing light, we know you can dust off and correct the missteps.

Your Excellency, if you are perhaps tempted to ask us, or silently ask yourself, as to where you went wrong in your first-year presidency, here are a few factual testaments: at the onset of your administration, while Liberians were thinking you came to the position as a father for all, you surprised the nation when you engaged into “political cleansing”, driving out or acquiescing the sacking without pay from job of droves of Liberians whose only wrong was being perceived as partisan of your rival. Secondly, you ignored the fact that most tenured jobs were enacted during the regime in which you were the vice president, and you unleashed a sustained unlawful revocation of the tenures to replace the incumbents with your political lackeys.

Thirdly, you watch apparently patronizingly, as corruption seethes right under you. The case with the NASSCORP extortion. The case with the yellow machines brought in, at which time you claimed ‘gentlemen agreement’ without a competitive international bidding process. The case with the busses fetched from Ghana. The case with unlawful ‘rescue’ of supposed ‘insolvent’ SIB Bank. The case with the fatal shooting of civilians in King Jor, Grand Cape Mount County, and the recent discharging of firearms on protestors in Monrovia.  And many more corrupt actions and incidents by your officials without reprimands.

Fourthly, and more disappointingly, Mr. President, is your role in the Capitol Hill leadership saga. Once again, you have given citizens reasons to believe critics who contend that you are not given to the nature of reconciliatory person or leader, but one who takes pleasure in fomenting division, acrimony and conflict, or just lack the traits of inclusive leadership. Your critics say you are the cause for the disintegration of Collaborating Political Parties (CPP), your inability to exercise leadership, to reconcile conflicting interests and young people under your leadership. Your critics say you were the cause for the conflict and feud that rock Unity Party during the dying days of the party when some partisans crudely insulted President Ellen Sirleaf and expelled her from the Party.

That pattern is clearly seen in your presidential leadership as far as the Speakership struggle rages in the 55th House of Representatives. You dropped and trampled under your feet all the labels as a patriarch, elderly statesman and experienced public servant and became overtly and covertly combative and bellicose agent on the side of one party, your party, instead of doing the necessarily elderly, experienced statesmanship thing of mediating between the protagonists. Even though House Speaker Koffa has not proven hostile to our rule, he has meekly followed you like a servant, but you lured him to the Golgotha of your “boys” to be slaughter. Even while the nation’s High Court intervened, you failed to call for respect to its edicts, but gone all out to embolden your UP children to discard and defy the Constitutional Court. Your promise to upholding the rule of law and ending business as usual was during the year dashed in the dust of shame and neglect.

Today, Mr. President, as a result of the combination of all these missteps or gross failures as others call them, anger is all over Liberia. The country is far more divided than you met it. Business as usual, as you met it, has blossom to epic proportions to date. Liberians are buried in despair desperately longing for someone to give them that elder-leadership that will heal wounds and reconcile Liberia’s children, and give them the rescue that you promised them.

To us, it is not late. You have a couple of years left. It requires that you first recognize the need for change, and then change radically at once by doing the right light. You know that is right to do. You know what you promised. You simply don’t care to heed promises you made. And sooner you dig up those promises, the better. And we think the House crisis, which has resulted into the burning down of the country’s Symbol of Democracy, the Dome, is your greatest shame. It is the mark of your greatest failure. You must end it in the first quarter of this year. You can do it. And the nation looks forward to you to act.

Hurry up and restore peace. Restore democracy and rule of law trampled upon in the last year. That is the biggest legacy you can’t build and leave on the sand of time. That is the only way those labels of experienced public servant, a humble patriarch and elder statesman can truly be merited.

Happy and Prosperous New Year!!

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