An Open Letter to President and Mrs. Barrack Obama on Michelle’s Historic visit to Liberia

I am a Liberian journalist based in the greater DC area. I have organized and led protests by Liberians outside the White House and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City against corruption and human rights abuses in Liberia under President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

I have written President Obama twice, first on March 18, 2014 and just  days before he received President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf  at the White House on February 27, 2015.  My themes in my letters are about corruption, injustice and human rights abuses in Liberia. The Liberian people have suffered for too long and they need immediate relief.  Please help them.

We Liberians see Mrs. Obama’s visit as our only and perhaps last with a black man in the White House whose father is an African.  Liberia is Africa’s first failed experiment at  genuine democracy on the Continent. After nearly 170 years of socalled “independence ” from July 26, 1847,  we are still as a nation trying to figure out how to run clean and safe drinking water into pipes to our cities and towns from the abundance of our reservoir of rivers and lakes.  It therefore  suffice to say Liberia’s greatest export to the rest of then colonial Africa has been the infectious, incurable cancer of corruption.

The overall Healthcare  system was exposed when EBOLA killed nearly 5000 Liberians in 2014. Thanks for your timely intervention for who knows how many Liberians would  have survived Ebola. Our President and senior government officials have not had their blood pressure checked at any government funded medical center in Liberia; they all run to the United States and elsewhere for the best in Healthcare treatment paid for with our Liberian tax dollars.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has described the education system in Liberia as “a mess”, and a big mess it is indeed. The state-owned University of Liberia has a little over 30,000 students who must share four public toilets on both campuses.  There are dilapidated classrooms on both campuses,  leaking roofs, students have no access to the global superhighway of  learning, the INTERNET. Students must fend for themselves to commute between both campuses miles apart because the University of Liberia doesn’t have its own fleet of buses to transport students. There is no running water on campuses and electricity is sporadic with off and on  that disrupts learning.

The operating budget of the University of Liberia has been hovering between $5 million  and  $10 million since President Sirleaf took office from 2006 to 2015, and just went up to $15 million this year (2016). President Sirleaf promised compulsory education for Liberian children and threatened to jail parents who don’t send their children to school.  But most children are now crushing rocks with their bare hands in the scorching tropical African heat trying to help jobless parents feed the family.  Please help Liberia.

For the sake of the suffering Liberian people, if necessary, Mrs. Obama should spend an extra day in Liberia to see firsthand poverty and underdevelopment.  Please have the US First Lady to visit both campuses of the University Liberia founded in the 1860s.

Jerry Wion
[email protected]