Liberia July 26 Reckoning: When a National Orator Goes Amok

This is a rejoinder to Liberia’s 2024 July 26 Oratory seeking to address a few of the sharp contradictions and obviously conflicting claims advanced by the orator. Because the orator’s statement can best qualify as a badly one-sided, narrow-minded or bigoted view, attempt will be made here to help elevate the discourse and amplify the requisite understanding of the issues for readers and not meant to demean or vilify. 

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By James Larsah, Jr.

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While the Independence Day statement did highlight quite a number of practical and productive ideas but mainly drawing on concepts, its bigoted and provocative nature frustrates informed readers enough to have to respond to the misplaced criticism of the administration of President Joseph Nyumah Boikai, the unwarranted misrepresentation of Liberia’s Special Relationship with the US government and people and, of course, the unqualified call for nationalizing a local language for the nation. These three concerns of the many are the focus of this article. 

The July 26 statement has evidently stirred mixed public reactions and sparked heated social medial controversies regarding what many view as the misplaced criticism of the administration of President Boakai for his handling of effort toward war crimes court and economic crimes court formation. 

Though this can be viewed as limited criticism, its inherent contradiction is exposed when the Dr. Robtel Pailey made a self-serving assertion in the statement titled, Radical Agenda for Re-imagining Liberia, that “When I worked in government over a decade ago, we developed a capacity building strategy that aligned with our development needs.” 

But as if gone amok, she unfortunately failed to specify the strategy she referenced or any given policy action or document with appropriate citation number or title. For example, we all have heard of the Public Finance Management Law (PFML), a great piece of policy document, instrumented under the watch of my friend and junior brother, former Finance Minister Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan. 

We also know of Cllr. Tiawan S. Gongloe’s policy measures taken at both the Justice Ministry as Solicitor-General and at the Labor Ministry as Minister. But the orator relished in what she considers her strategic accomplishment under the massively failed Ellen-Johnson Sirleaf government while failing to reference any of the systemic failures of that corrosively corrupt government, and while she also chose to blindside the numerous hallmark achievements of the Boakai administration. Of course, the contradictions could not be clearer.

Another contradiction involves the utter misrepresentation of Liberia’s relations with the United States of America, where the orator once more engaged in faulty assumptions and sheer distortion of historical facts. 

For example, the orator asserts that the country’s independence was inspired by defiance, as if not instead by cooperation, collaboration and, most of all, Christian brotherhood among the nation’s earliest founding leaders. She probably may not know that there are still to this day actual meeting minutes or meeting notes from the founding days still available in archives online, physically at the US Library of Congress and other places such as universities and other sites. Reading some of the meeting minutes lets readers not only learn, know but also appreciate how leaders were trained to be fiscally disciplined by regularly keeping periodic financial records of revenues and expenses of the government. In those meetings, serious attention was given to the importance of avoiding budget deficits or “shortage” as they referred to such those days. 

And when it came time to determine a definite date for a given even but the timeline did not seem practical or realistically achievable, they would meet and agree to postpone such activities, including such as even the date for the declaration of independence. Therefore, the declaration of independence was not an act of defiance as the orator so wrongly asserts but rather through amicable, loving and brotherly engagement. 

Evidently, the contradictions are not only many and sharp but also unimaginable or ‘un-re-imaginable,’ per se, as the orator would prefer.

And if one thought the confusion could not get any worse, the orator would prove them wrong even more. On the count of the claim that the fact of the special relationship between Liberia and the USA is non-existent or that it exists only in the imagination, she could not more sharply confuse her readers, as the reality of the special relationship is undeniable. 

For example, simply using the following key words to search in YouTube or Google, the hard facts pop up right in your face: President William Richard Tolbert Speaks at the Congress in 1974. In the video where President Tolbert addressed the Joint Congress of the USA, he proudly and accurately described Liberia’s relationship with the US as “Special Relationship,” “Unique Relationship,” and “Historical Relationship.” 

How the orator presents herself as lacking this factually historical information is both strange and unacceptable. However, the contradiction got even more stark when the orator insisted that “the United States has taken more from us than it has given,” though she failed absolutely to show any due diligence or a duty to care in providing support for her claim with any statistics or number. Certainly, this is not only contradictory but also confusing.

For instance, if there is any help that can be rendered here, let the orator be reminded of President Tolbert’s reference in his 1977 address to US Joint Congress where he praised the US for the ‘Special Relationship,’ ‘Unique Relationship’ and ‘Historical Relationship’ between Liberia and the USA. Let her also be reminded that it was the US that built the RIA International Airport, the only international airport in the country to this day, the national seaport or Freeport, the JFK Medical Hospital, much less to speak of the multi-million dollars given to Liberia each year since the nation’s founding in grants, loans, technical and military aids, and in many other forms. How about the multi-million dollars generated by the Liberian Maritime program each year? 

How does she think Liberia managed to secure such a critical international position of huge financial advantage if not for the US? Doesn’t she know that the United States is the world’s police for international navigation, protecting all the strategic bodies of water around the world for safe sea travel and shipment of goods? 

How does she think any country would want to carry the Liberian flag of convenience if they did not know that the USA was there to protect their ships? Does she care to ask why Liberia let the office of the ACS formerly located near the E. J. Roye building around the former law library to be abandoned due to failure to pay miniscule taxes? Doesn’t she know that the former International Trust Company of Liberia was an American banking institution supporting the work of the ACS? Why, for example, does she think there is still to this day the Office of the Marshall Fund located in Europe, actually in Germany, for the purpose of supporting their effort in Europe? 

There is just so much to be covered here but for time and space…

And the third and last flawed assertion the orator advanced was her unqualified call to make a local language the country’s national language, in addition to demanding for changing every national symbol like the flag, seal, anthem, awards, the name of Monrovia, among others. Of course, this is one recommendation of the message that is sort of tricky but also easy to navigate. Here, the orator does not seem to grasp or distinguish between making a language an official language and a national language of a nation, since she did not bother to elaborate or provide specifics. But if she had given such consideration, there would have been effort to clarify the inherent ambiguity. For example, adopting an official language requires government’s funding and program for implementation while adopting a national language requires more than just government’s funding but also government’s actions to both promote and protect the national language. 

This is why to designate any given language as a national language, several critical implications must be considered, like the percentage of the population speaking the language already, the capacity for investing in promoting and protecting the national language. Interestingly, to protect a national language can sometimes mean nobody finding excuse for not speaking or learning the language or speaking in another language. 

A classic example is the reason largely credited for causing the civil war in former united country of Sudan, where the late John Garang, then the leader of black Sudanese, wanted a united Sudan nation but with no national language. To the contrary, however, the African Arab leaders refused because they preferred Arabic to be spoken by everybody and that the other black Africans should be forced to abandon their native tongues in preference for the Arabic language. Quite frankly, a public debate regarding this question demands more sober and holistic approach that considers implications for designating a language as official or national, and the capacity for investment for promotion and protection of  said national language.

I, myself, had once initiated advancing such a bill to designate Kpelleh as a national language when I was elected to the Liberian Legislature to represent Bong County some nearly 30 years ago but it got bugged down in the drafting stage with my office staff. And even by then, the full implications for making such a move were not as fully clear as they are now. For example, the largest ethnic speaking group in Liberia is about 26% of the population while about 90% of the people in Tanzania speak Swahili, where a national language was instituted. 

And in terms of investment required for such an undertaking, Tanzania’s yearly budget is more than 10 billion US dollars while Liberia’s budget is not even 10% of that. Against this background, it might be more prudent to prioritize other areas of urgently needed development, given the harsh economic burden and answers to other critical challenges it would require if it were not simply intended for pandering to public sentiment. 

This article is an attempt driven by disappointment at the utter recklessness of the national oration but also underpinned by the hope of amplifying some of the questions and deepening the understanding of the readers regarding the various issues emanating from the July 26 oratory. 

There is evidence that the statement was more activist than reflective in tone, and based more on stereotypes than conventional wisdom or originality. Such an opportunity to speak to an entire nation should be elevated to draw on the harsh realities of the society, the abject socio-economic condition of the people rather than indulging in long held idealized notions.

Disclosure: I am a mid-level manager and a non-US citizen who has resided in the United States for many years but who has never ever contemplated denouncing his Liberian citizenship.