Your Excellency:
We once again cease this moment to thank you for all the efforts you have started with since last year, your first year in office, and to wish you a prosperous New Year. As indicated in our previous Memo to you, we have no illusion about your successful strides because everyone sees the great passion and determination that you bring to the national leadership in terms of being practical and theoretical. That passion and determination was expressed in your relinquishment of portion of your salary, decreasing salaries of all public servants making more than US$5,000 and modernizing the University of Liberia and granting free tuition in public colleagues, amongst many other things.
We also have taken note of your zeal and determination to build paved roads in your first term than all other presidents before you did. That zeal and determination was expressed in the multiplicity of community road projects already started, some completed. You also have made intensive strides to get international loans to do major corridors of roads, particularly in the Southeast and Western Liberia. These are redemptive efforts and we urge you to keep the up the speed in the new year so that the celebration by the populace for these developments will not short-live.
In this vein, we would like to encourage Your Excellency to pay attention to the thorough completion of the paved roads earmarked, specifically community roads already started.
While it is good that two or three of them were completed in your first year in office, we take note of several others that have remained incomplete. We are concerned about this because our observation shows that contractors of some of these community roads are proving themselves unfit or lacking capacity to handle the terms of their contracts—terms that speak to timely completion.
Take off time, as you usually do Mr. President, to visit the St. Michael-Tusa Field-Patience-Shop road. Or advance further to the Dry-Rice-Market-Mount-Barclay corridor. Or simply stroll your way to Pipe Line. And there are many other community roads where contractors appear to be on more-day-more-dollar affairs. Without determining reason for this delayed tactic, one can see the incapacity of these contractors not only expressed in the extreme slowness of works but also in the acutely poor quality and quantity of machineries deployed.
Our concern is based on the assumption that these contractors are paid from taxpayers monies and that you have tightened grips on domestic revenues and other important expenses just to allot money for the roads. We are also concerned because the raining season is not afar and the very communities you have endeavored to rescue from bad roads could soon turn out to be no different from deplorable road conditions in the hinterland. The huge dirt compiled up in the name of fixing roads could turn into huge muds that would cut off the target communities if nothing if done to speed up works.
It is against this backdrop that we are calling you to continue your usual routine monitoring visits to community road project sites. As we all know, it was your frequent visits that resulted into the short span of time on the roads that were completed and it was because of your frequent monitoring visits that hastened the commencement of many roads that are in progress today.
We believe that continued routine monitoring of the road projects by the President of Liberia would add physical and psychosocial pressures on the contractors to do their best and do so without indulging into more-day-more-dollar work habit.
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