Total heartbreaking story even for people who don’t know both families of the young couple who lost their lives in such senseless tragedy.
And it is complete nonsense for anyone to point fingers at the husband who too died from this tragedy as insinuated in the 5th paragraph in the story from the bottom while an autopsy report and Police investigation are pending.
But blame for this tragedy and hundreds like it over the years must be placed on those who confessed to their role in sponsoring the 14-year Liberian genocidal holocaust that destroyed the little electricity we had.
And then when they promised to restore electricity and drinking water six months upon taking office in January 2006, we are still waiting for electricity 11 years into their presidency. These unregulated deadly spewing carbon monoxide substandard electric generators have sent hundreds, if not thousands, of Liberians to their early graves.
Just less than two weeks ago (December 15), Liberians were hook winked into believing that their 20-plus years of waiting for a centralized supply of power was at an end. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf switched on the much anticipated electricity on December 15 only for the historically plagued Liberia Electricity Corporation to resort to its famous excuses giving mantra in justifying the power outages.
Are Liberians eternally cursed with failure of good leadership at every turn of our national life? The failure of everything in our country is intrinsically tied to our political leadership failure, and thus an ever elusive true democracy from which all failures flow in Liberia and which would have held leaders accountable. And after 12 wasteful years, we go into new elections in 2017 looking for the lesser of the evils of the candidates we must choose from.
That our political leaders turned down an offer from China to build from scratch 240 megawatts of hydro power, instead we opted to refurbish an old generation of turbines that provided 88 megawatts and was plagued with frequent power outages.
Immediately our neighbor Guinea pleaded with the Chinese to locate the 240 MW hydro power plant in Guinea and is almost ready. Sure indeed, Guinea will be glad to become a landlord and rent power to Liberia like we are now doing renting electricity from our neighbor to the east, Ivory Coast.
This buttresses my argument of a failed political leadership curse for Liberia although we are the oldest independent Republic in Africa: 170 years old.
And now we have a young couple who because of love of country and decided to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary in Liberia, left the comfort of America with its steady supply of electricity only to go home and die from the substandard carbon monoxide spewing unregulated generators that contaminate the air.
We deeply sympathize with the couple and their families, but our government also bears responsibility in their deaths and the thousands of Liberians who died and continue to die in such senseless tragedy. Where there is no vision, the people perish. Indeed, 250,000 Liberians have perished and hundreds more each year from bad roads related motor accidents, carbon monoxide spewing from electric generators and from a broken healthcare system.
Jerry Wehtee Wion,
Journalist and Political Commentator
Washington, DC, USA