Your Excellency,
It becoming clearer by the day that you have forgotten the solemn promise that you overly made during your campaign in 2023 and have loudly reaffirmed in your inaugural address on January 22, 2024. Perhaps it has been long since you made that promise, or perhaps you are overwhelmed with enormous presidential activities and have forgotten. We write today’s memo to refresh your memory on this promise and plead with you to keep it.
As various campaign rallies, whether it was in the capital Monrovia or in the countryside, you assured Liberians that if you won, you would put an end to “business as usual”. While many were thinking those were mere campaign rhetoric, you again reaccentuated the promise, as you took the sacred oath of office. This is what you said at that time:
“I applaud the people of Liberia who voted in their numbers for change. Not only did Liberians vote but they also showed unwavering resolve to protect their votes, a phenomenon not to be taken lightly. Hundreds became volunteer poll watchers at polling stations, including the hardest to reach places, throughout the country. The message they sent by their act of courage and determination is loud and clear: no more business as usual [emphasis ours]”.
Mr. President, a week later, you faced the nation, and while delivering your first state of the nation address, you also said this: “When we work together, there is nothing we cannot overcome as a people. This is why, I ask you the representatives of our people to join me to do the business of the Liberian people by not doing business as usual (emphasis ours).
Again, less than two months, during another important public function at which time you commissioned a good chunk of your appointed officials, you reaffirmed the promise. You said: “When we officially took office, we informed the country and the world that the ‘business as usual approach’ would be a relic of the past for this Administration, and we mean it. This is why we expect nothing less from the ministers, heads of agencies, and advisors being commissioned today…”
Those few verbatim quotes are only a drop in the ocean of how many times and how long you have sermonized, avowed and promised to end “business as usual” – this cancerous virus of epidemic proportion that has bedeviled and ruined this country for so long. Wherever you went during and since the 2023 campaign, and since your inauguration—be it in-country, in Asia, or America and Africa, all your local and international media interviews—your usual refrain has been “I will bring to an end business as usual”.
But while you keep making this singular commitment, while you keep singing this song of “there will be no business as usual”, Liberians and the people of the world keep seeing and observing something else: the gross opposite of the vow. Or is it that your definition of “business as usual” is different from what it actually universally literally means? Because, the last time we checked, “business as usual” as defined by the online Cambridge Dictionary all other English dictionaries this: an idiom that is said “when things are continuing as they always do, despite a difficult situation”.
If that definition is also your definition, then Mr. President, we are constrained, and please allow us, to ask the following questions: How different are you and past administrations regarding policies and actual actions on the ground? Are you not doing the same things, others say doing even worse, of “the usual business” you promised to end?
Let’s reflect.
One. The last administration you succeeded, the George Weah CDC government, attempted to uproot tenured officials. Everyone, including you and your administration, criticized loudly, saying that was wrong. But as you took over the leadership, did you leave tenured officials alone? Didn’t you bully them into subjection, crudely dragging them out of their offices?
Two. In the second or third quarter of the first year of the Weah administration, Liberians were shocked when that government consummated a deal with ETON and EBOMA worth nearly US$2 billion, expressly to build roads, including the construction of a coastal highway. The alarmed public, including you and your Unity Party, cursed and badmouthed the government for doing “black market business”. Today, in less than five months of your incumbency, you have imported 285 yellow machines without carrying out standard, nationally legalized procurement processes, not to talk about legislative ratification.
Three. Mr. President, was it not you and your Unity Party that damned, insulted and dismissed the Weah administration for free college tuition policy it promulgated and implemented, terming it evil, incompetent and disservice to the education sector of Liberia? Nearly six months in office, and even with your first fiscal budget, how come that free tuition policy is still at alive and well?
Four. The opposition community, principally you and your Unity Party, made heaven break loose when the photos of ex-President George Weah were placed on light poles and other national infrastructures and logistics. You termed it as idolization and personalization of public service. Today, the very attitude has become commonplace. Your photos and the photos of your vice president are all over the place, on buses, on yellow machines and other state infrastructures.
Your Excellency, there are countless more instances of how you and your administration are not only religiously copycatting, replicating and walking in the footsteps of our predecessors, nearly all the policies and programs of the immediate past predecessor are being maintained and maximized, doing the worse, bringing to bear even “usual business” to antiquity—to the days of the True Whig Party, National Democratic Party of Liberia, the Liberia National Transitional Government and the National Patriotic Party.
It is not late, Mr. President. Please begin to check a break and turn from this ugly path; for it is clear—as clear as midday sun is—that in the last six months of your incumbency, you failed very grossly in keeping your promise to end business as usual. You are deeply submerged in the pool of business as usual; meaning you are not doing anything so far that is the opposite of what your predecessors have done. All over the place, your officials are caught in corruption and improbity webs, taking loans and concessions without following established procedures, nepotism, spending millions without results, without legislative approbations.
How can Liberians say you have brought change, and you have come to rescue? Or maybe, is it that you have come to rescue but not to rescue the impoverished majority but rather to rescue yourselves—the leaders and proponents of the rescue mantra?
We call you, Mr. President, to see the need, the urgency, of sobering up to turn away from the path chosen—the path of business as usual. Keep your promise.
Liberians are just weary with the vicious circle of electing their compatriots to leadership in the hope of bettering their conditions, in the hope of ending business as usual, and the promised changemakers turn out to be drowned in the lake of business as usual.
Please be the change you promise. Thanks for your understanding.
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