MONROVIA: This year’s celebration of Liberia’s Independence Day is arguably the most controversy-marred event, as specifically triggered by the main oration that was delivered by one of Liberia’s young academics and intellectuals, Dr. Robtel Pailey. The aim she took, targeting the country’s closest world power and ally, the United States, relegating its support and friendship to Liberia, has ignited uproarious discourse, and she has been getting perhaps more whips than kudos. The National Orator’s narratives have also fallen out with fiery-tongued former Deputy Information Minister Isaac Jackson who described her analysis regarding US-Liberia relations as “poison” for which he is calling on her to stop spreading. The Analyst reports.
In continuation of the controversy generated by Liberia’s 177th Independence Day orator, Dr. Robtel Pailey, when she accused the United States, which engineered the emergence of the Liberian state, as not doing much to commensurate with widely-held perception about a special relationship between the two countries, another Liberian intellectual has entered the fray.
Isaac Jackson, former Deputy Information Minister in the Ellen Johnson-Sireleaf administration, has posited that it was “wholly and entirely unwise for the National Orator to use the national podium to pillory and denigrate US-Liberia relations”.
He said given this sensitive diplomatic matter, President Boakai’s administration “has demonstrated its lack of sound leadership judgment when, led by his foreign minister, selected a relatively inexperienced academic firebrand who used the national platform to generate and spread poison against the government and people of the United States – forgetting that it was the US Government that sent its military to contain and beat back Ebola when Liberia was declared the epicentre of the worst Ebola epidemic”.
“To ameliorate this situation,” he suggested the foreign minister “should be made to walk the plank – because she bears the greatest responsibility for the entire debacle – having failed to review what this disrespectful academic firebrand had planned to spew against our important ally, the US – in the presence of China and Russia”.
According to him, “the orator’s demeanor and body language described who she really is in terms of character and outlook.” He added: “Absolutely, nothing to do being a junior PhD holder. Why was she wagging her speech and screaming at her audience with intense hostility?”
Jackson also warned that, going forward, “in protection of its academic brand, I trust that the London School of Economics will want to have a say when the likes of Ms. Dr. Robtel Pailey happens to be invited to a major event similar to Liberia’s July Twenty-six anniversary”.
Continuing the former Liberia Permanent Representative to the International Maritime Organization emphasized: “Mind you, while our people were dying like flies with American soldiers making frantic efforts to beat back Ebola by building treatment centers, setting up mobile labs as well as helping to train local health workers, Boakai as Vice President was still collecting his actual full salary.
“So, how dare Boakai and his minions denigrate the US like they did?”
He said it is also important to note that whenever the megaphone phone is used to address historical grievances, diplomacy always walks out of the room.
“So, I take issue with those who say the Americans were wrong for walking out of the national program,” he stressed. “In as much as Dr. Robtel Pailey relished her right to free speech, the Americans exercised their right to free movement.”
According to him, the Liberian Government’s position that Robtel “is a lone wolf and that her position doesn’t reflect that of the government is laughably absurd”.
Before according this lady the national podium, at least, Jackson asserted, “the government should have known her position. The strategy being deployed by the Boakai administration was also used by Charles Taylor when he sent Cyril Allen to rain insult on US ambassador Bismark Myrick.”
“If there are historical grievances to be addressed,” he said, “we need to use reliable diplomatic backchannels; with astute diplomats, well-versed in diplomatic mannerisms to communicate our grievances, not an outburst from a firebrand academic and some of the flunkies Boakai named as presidential envoys.”
“By the way, with the outburst from Dr. Pailey, will the Americans now come galloping to our every need?” he quipped.