The Editor,
About two weeks ago I wrote a commentary in FrontPageAfrica under Letters to the Editor: “CDC Must Redirect Priorities in Pursuit of State Power” in which I pleaded with the CDC and Senator George Weah to try and work out a collaborative deal for a coalition with Vice President Joseph Boikai.
Notice I said to work out a deal with VP Joseph and not the Unity Party. I have my reasons because Mr. Joseph Boakai is minus the ruling Unity Party although he carries the label.
I am worried by the company that Senator Weah surrounds himself with going into the pivotal 2017 presidential elections. It is said that “show me the friends of a person and I can tell you about his habits.”
Senator George Manneh Weah is Kru like me and Mr. Joseph Boakai is Kissi from Lofa County in Western Liberia. CDC should have learned the hard lessons from its “defeat” in the 2005 and 2011 presidential elections.
Like it or not, Liberia’s political fate rests with the international community: principally, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, ECOWAS and the African Union. As long as foreign troops are in Liberia to keep the peace, those who write the checks will call the shots on the future of Liberia. Take this advice to the bank.
I said it before and I say it again: George Weah’s shortest route to the Liberian presidency is through Vice President Joseph Nyuma Boakai. It is a dangerous political risk for Mr. Weah to align himself with certain individuals.
If they were to be elected some will not travel to the United States for their role in the bloodletting in Liberia. If the United States can deport former PRC military junta member Jeffery Gbatu this week to Liberia, then it should send a signal to the CDC about who its friends should be, and I am not calling names.
Mr. Joseph Boakai and Senator George Weah both have clean hands, if people know what I mean. I live in Washington, DC and Weah needed to wait till after November 8, 2016 to see who is elected President of the United States before signing any merger deals with Jewel Taylor, Benoni Urey and Alex Tyler. This would have been a strategic political decision by Mr. Weah and the CDC to wait for the outcome in the American presidential elections. Hope I am wrong.
In politics, careful and strategic calculation is as prudent to winning and what happens after winning. No Liberian government will triumph without the political and economic blessings from the United States of America. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know this reality about America being the lifeline to Liberia. Maybe I am wrong because “sheep and goat luck not the same.”
Even if you remove America from the equation, a political party must be smart enough to know the forces that wield undue influence over the two main bodies that determine the outcome in elections in Liberia: the National Elections Commission and the Supreme Court of Liberia.
The big question that the CDC must ask itself is: Why is it widely reported by the media in Liberia that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is supporting Mr. Charles Brumskine of the Liberty Party and not her loyal Vice President Joseph Boakai of her ruling Unity Party?
Why are there major defections from the ruling party? A key reason could be to praise the triumph of “democracy” when an opposition party is declared “winner” and not the ruling party. This is why Mr. Boakai is left to fend for himself and why he is a good bet for a merger with CDC.
But what do I know for a journalist who left home in 1981. Maybe there are things the CDC knows that I don’t know, but my heart is crying for CDC merger with Mr. Boakai. At 74, Mr. Boakai may want to serve just one term and say, my son George Weah, here the thing, you take it. I want rest.”
Please CDC and Senator Weah, don’t let the thing slip from our hands again. If not, we will be waiting for 12 years for whoever wins and another 12 years when he turns it over to his vice president for a total of 24 long years. Think about it. May the best person win in 2017. Just a thought and not a sermon.
Jerry Wehtee Wion,
[email protected]
Washington, DC, USA