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The Editor,
President Weah evoked the Code of Conduct two weeks ago when he asked prospective candidates to the 2020 elections to resign from their positions.
The President however ignores an important component of the same Code of Conduct: the obligation for
all members of the executive to declare their assets upon taking office. This glaring selective implementation of the law is a slap in the face of people who have worked hard to get the Code of Conduct to be passed into law. I still recall the day Dr. Amos Sawyer submitted the bill to the Interim Legislative Assembly back in 1992. It took all those years to finally get it done just a few years ago under President Sirleaf.
However, President Sirleaf administration also did the same tap dancing with the Code of Conduct she herself had fought to pass into law. Members of the executive stayed on the job and for office in 2017 until elections day and after they lost, using government resources to run their campaigns, they came back to their job. This was a major blunder, setting a bad precedent that will be used again and again, undermining one of the main pillars of transparency and good governance.
Back in 2017, I saw then Minister Eugene Nagbe in the office of the protocol, waiting to see President Sirleaf. I went to him and told him that he was breaking the law and putting the president in a jam by being Secretary General of a political party that is campaigning and holding the position of spokesman of the government.
He responded that he had discussed it with the President and I said: “Yes, I just told her. “. Indeed, I was walking out of President Sirleaf office and had told her that we were playing games with laws that we fought to get passed. She said nothing. That was then. It was bad and it is worse today.
But the fact that the past government broke the law should not be an excuse to do it again.
This same selective implementation of the laws is what led to the Vice President not receiving her dues. If she had told the President that no member of his cabinet would be allowed in the Senate without declaring their assets, she would have acted within her role and gained respect for it.
Liberia has all the right laws on the books. But when leaders take pleasure in circumventing the basic terms of the social contract, the nation remains stranded.
These issues should preoccupy social and political institutions.
Abdoulaye Dukule