Monrovia – Montserrado County District#4 Representative elects, Rustonlyn Suacoco Dennis has vowed to contest for the Deputy Speakership of the 54th National Legislature of Liberia ahead of the inauguration on January 22.
Report by Augustine T. Tweh – [email protected]
She is entering a packed field of contestants for the deputy speakership, but said the details of the competition should be should be restricted to the 73 lawmakers and not the public.
‘It will do me no good in a sense that they are not part of the electorates so if the rumor is truth then let me just accentuate… then let me focus on the 73 and forget the public,” she told state radio LBS on Friday.
Madam Dennis said her ambition to contest the Deputy Speakership of the 54th National Legislature is to help tackle the many challenges confronting the Liberian people and the parliament.
“Like I always said to my colleagues, my being in the legislature, I just said gave me the opportunity to serve because this is what we need new ideas, we need new brains and we need innovation in the house of parliament. It all doesn’t have to come from the national budget,” she said.
She adds: “ What I always tell my colleagues is time for us to look up the hill and stop looking under the table because if we continue looking under the table we restrain ourselves.”
The 28 year-old representative-elect said one of the best ways forward to adequately work in the interest of the Liberian people is “engaging the outside world and lobbying with friends for support”.
She said this would help boost the Liberian economy instead of heavily depending only on the country’s budget.
“If we continued looking under the table we restrain ourselves and we don’t properly represent the people who put us there, we don’t properly do what we want to do for the country because we just stick our minds only under the table, only on the Liberian budget. So it is about time that we look out there and make friends outside,” she said.
Dennis said her major priorities are empowerment of local dwellers and community development.
“I want to effect more local empowerment among community dwellers; I want to carry on significant community development. District four is a very large district and as of now we do not have district town hall, we do not have administrative building, we do not have lot of public services, that I felt that our lawmaker was not in our interest because throughout the campaign when we want to have meeting and it is raining our meeting gets distrusted.
“So how can we have a district of 63290 inhabitants and we don’t have a district town hall, we need place to converge to express our idea to move the district forward,” she said.
“We have issues of bad roads, we have issues of poor quality of drinking water and I felt that our lawmaker abandoned the people and the result proved to him that he totally forget the people.”