Monrovia – The Patriotic Entrepreneurs of Liberia (PATEL), the organization comprising all major importers and business associations in Liberia, has temporarily cutoff its ongoing protest with a promise to resume with a more drastic approach.
Report by Edwin Genoway, Jr – [email protected]
Plan ‘B’, as they termed it, is intended to completely shut down the economy with the involvement of commercial drivers and petroleum dealers joining the strike.
“We are only temporarily cutting off the protest to allow our people buy food and keep it in their homes.
As you know the protest took people unaware and more people didn’t buy food, so we will open our stores and businesses and allow our people to put food in their homes before we start our Plan ‘B’.
Our plans are not to suffer the people; we are economy liberators fighting for our economy,” said Presley Tenwah, the Chairman of PATEL
He continued: “We are again encouraging our people to purchase whatever they want since all the businesses and stores are now opened because our Plan ‘B’ will include even pettytraders, if we cannot hear from government in our meeting with the President, we will engage our Plan ‘B’ and ‘C’ which we know will not be good but will solve our problem,” he said.
According to Tenwah, during the temporary break, the leadership of the group will hold meeting with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf over their concerns.
PATEL is meeting the President today, February 3. Possibility for the complete call off of the strike exists, if the meeting with the President yields positive results.
“We decided to relax our action based on appeals from the Liberian government, but we will resume our protest if there is no fruitful result from the ongoing negotiations,” he said.
While Sirleaf is set to meet with the PATEL today, highly placed sources at the Executive Mansion said Sirleaf is poised to introduce some tough austerity measures, including barring officials in the Executive from travelling for the next 90 days.
The exchange rate of the Liberian and US Dollars has already dropped by 10%.
The group, in their petition presented to the Legislature Tuesday, called for the classification of Liberian businesses in a specific group among the four categories of tariffs, to enable them pay flat rate tax of 0% – 5% tax on all goods imported in Liberia.
They also called for a single custom examination before any payment rather than multiple examinations of goods that are being conducted with separate and distinct tax payments.
The local entrepreneurs called for measures to taken to tackle and stabilize the constant fluctuations of the U.S. Dollar against the Liberian Dollar in an effort to reduce hardships experienced by both sellers and buyers.
Major businesses and stores were shut since Tuesday, January 31 in solidarity of a go-slow action by Liberian businesses.
The action was to draw government’s attention to the prevailing economic hardship Liberian are enduring coupled with inflation of the exchange rate and the imposition of huge taxes on goods imported to the country.
The chairman of the group thanked all of the foreigners who own businesses in Liberia for complying with the protest.
“Our special thanks and appreciation goes to the Liberian people and our members who stood and standing by us in this struggle, especially the Fula Business Association, Nigerian Business Association, Lebanese Business Association, the Indian Business Association and the National Custom Brokers Association among others,” he said.
The Patriotic Entrepreneurs of Liberia (PATEL) comprises of the Car dealers Association, National Petty Traders Association, Liberia Marketing Association, Wheelbarrow Boys Association, Cross Borders Women Association, Auto parts Association, Auto Repairs Association, Paynesville Business Association, Cosmetologists and Beauty Salons Association.
Other subsidiary member organizations also include the Art and Craft Association, Bar and Restaurant Association, Airline and Ticketing Association, Yana Boys Association and all commercial districts including Waterside, Red-light, Rally Town, Duala and Old Road Market among others.