Barclayville, Grand Kru County – The Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) candidate for electoral District #1 of Grand Kru County is telling the county’s registered voters who are on ‘buy-my-vote-now-before-the election-day bargain’ that she’s willing to meet their demand, but on a different barter system.
The Presidential and legislative voting time is scheduled for October 10, 2017
“I’m on sell-pay,” Madam Doris Nyanplane Ylatun, the only and first female candidate in the race with 16 persons competing for District #1 of Grand Kru County, declared to electorates in each of the County’s six statutory districts, beginning first with Picnic Cess, a suburb of District #1, on August 29.
Madam Ylatun, 47, had said this several times in the past, beginning first with her interview with Grand Kru County’s only Community Radio Station—Voice of Grand Kru—in June.
The station had repeatedly played the recording over two months, since the interview to the annoyance of the CDC’s candidate.
“I feel one of my political opponents has paid for the continuous replay of this recording, just to embarrass me,” Madam Ylatun had complained to some supporters who told her they had heard the comment over Voice of Grand Kru again.
“But I don’t care; that person is just making me more popular,” she conceded.
Many Grand Kruans had strongly criticized her on this statement, with some understanding it as meaning she had borrowed money from some persons to be repaid with huge interest, which would affect her legislative work.
Madam Ylatun has made several clarifications on her conscious use of this statement.
“You know, sell-pay is a Liberian marketing pidgin English, which means, you, a business person, take another business person’s goods on credit now, to pay later, because you don’t have money now to pay cash-down for the goods,” Madam Ylatun explained at a Town Hall Meeting in the Jlatekporh Elementary & Junior High School, in Picnic Cess.
“For this Representative election, I’m telling you, credit me with your votes, without asking me for money for the votes, which I don’t have, and I will pay back with development projects in your various Towns or communities.”
On her campaign financing, she said she won’t credit money from any bank to dish out “five thousand…ten thousand…twenty thousand on groups of persons, just because I want them vote for me,” she said to residents of Po River Middle Town, another community, on Day Three of her campaign outreach.
“Let’s assume, I borrowed hundred thousand U.S. dollars from a bank now to buy your votes,” she continued, “and I win the Representative election, the bank’s interest on the loan would be almost three times the capital before I have money to pay back.
In this case, tt’s the District’s development money I will use to pay back the loan with the interest, while the District is still under-developed, and you will be criticizing me over not doing anything for the District, as you are doing to those before me. Instead of paying huge interest to the Bank, I should pay you in development projects on your free votes.”
Most of the people seem convinced by Madam Ylatun’s clarification.
“Follow the foot print, not the shadow,” she announced her main campaign’s slogan to a gathering of government officials, Youth Group, Women’s Group and other residents of Grand Cess.
“The foot print, in this context, means consistency of development projects, which I had undertaken across the entire district number-one and beyond since 2004, when I came here.
The shadow refers to inconsistency—somebody who has done little or nothing for you, or is coming into the district your community only during election time, dishing out money on you for your votes, and to live permanently in Monrovia, his base, after you’ve elected him, and will tell you later, ‘I bought your votes’.”
The mother-of-three, who holds an Associate Degree in Management from the Lincoln Commercial Institute, in Monrovia, tells electorates she loves them and the district than any of her political opponents.
“My love for you and the district is proven by my living permanently in the County and having only in the County all my investments since 2004, when I moved to here,” she repeats at each campaign meeting.
She mentioned, as some of her “foot prints”, construction of the Jlatekpoh Elementary & Junior High School in Picnic Cess; supply of Tools Banks for road creation, and supply of garri processing machines to empower both men and women in cassava farming.
Each project was made possible, she admitted, through her lobbying power when she was Executive Director of the Grand Kru Women Development Association, an implementing partner for the Liberia Agency for Community Empowerment (LACE) in Grand Kru County; and, later, as County Coordinator of the Southeastern Women Development Association (SEWODA).
She promised to “carve out more developmental foot prints when elected to the House of Representatives come October 2017, including “construction of soap factories, and construction of a magisterial court to improve the justice system in the district.
Doris, a member of the Wedabo ethnic group, from where no woman had stepped forward to compete for any government, boasts:
“By being in this legislative race, I’ve achieved another first,” she said on September 15 to residents of Gbanken, of the Wedabo ethnic group, where somebody had criminally torn-off her image from her banner (leaving only images of her party’s standard bearer, George Manneh Weah, and vice standard bearer, Jewel Howard-Taylor) two weeks to her campaign tour there.
“I’m the first woman competing with men for the Representative post since our County was created in nineteen-eighty-four. Education gives me the confidence to come out; I want to inspire other women of Grand Kru to do same.”
Madam Ylatun says Grand Kru County as a house isn’t in order, because there’s no woman with the County’s set of legislators in the current National Legislature.
“I want to enter the House to put the house in order,” she said fervently to a group of electorates in Zoloken, one of the Towns she experiences a stiffer opposition.
Reporting – Samuel G. Dweh/ Freelance Journalist