Monrovia – Eyebrows have also been raised with the prospects of the Coalition over the atrocities committed by the National Patriotic Front of Liberia that culminated into the NPP, as well as the integrity of the LPDP with former Speaker Alex Tyler as a stalwart.
“The thing that we need to move away from in the Liberian political dispensation is that we need to move away from personalities and focus on institutions,” Ambassador Barnes argued.
“Alex Tyler is a leader of an institution; that institution is not Alex Tyler. Sometimes we tend to associate the institution with the personality.
He said Representative Tyler was only facing allegation that he received bribe in the Sable Mining scandal and that did not make the LPDP guilty of what he has been accused of, conceding, though, that it was a difficult thing to do in Liberian politics.
We need to focus on institutions, the platform, the philosophy and vision. We’re going to work with institution.
Mr. Tyler has bought in a team to the fore, representing the LPDP institution. They are not distracted nor tainted by these allegations made against him.
Similarly, Ambassador Barnes said it was not deniable that the NPP evolved from the NPFL and became a political institution, but he said the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf be barred from political activities over her alleged role in the Liberian civil war.
Barnes served as Minister of Finance during the regime of President Charles Taylor but claimed he was not a member of the NPP.
In the Tuesday interview, he said he had done so because the job of the Minister of Finance was a technical job.
He, however said, he had now only joined the NPP because the party was going through a period of rebranding the transformation.
“As time goes on, political parties will change.
There are some political institutions in the United States that have some pretty tough atrocities in their histories by they have evolved, they have grown and it is the same thing with many of the politicians and parties in Liberia.
We need to try to transcend that.
“The NPP of today is not the NPP of 2011; the NPP of 2011 is certainly not the NPP of 2005 and not the NPP of the past, so we need to move beyond that.”