Grand Kru County – Ms. Doris Nyanplane Ylatun, 47, is of the Wedabo ethnic group (chiefdom) of Grand Kru County, in southeastern Liberia.
She’s a member of Electoral District #1 of Grand Kru County composed of six traditional communities.
The district has several dehumanizing problems. Here are six proofs out of dozens:
Majority of residential structure are constructed with mud and roofed with grass straw or palm thatch.
There’s no electricity. (Source of light in homes is from car battery only to find things in the home and to charge mobile phone).
No plain road (all roads are bumpy or dotted with mud that sometimes reaches above a person’s ankle) and some of the communities are cut off from other Towns due to the absence of road.
No health center in many of them.
Only one senior high school in only one community (Grand Cess) and has no library and insufficient teaching staff.
There’s teachers shortage in each Elementary & Junior High across the district, which push some principals of many of the schools to go into the classroom to teach two to three subjects.
All these problems are in Electoral District #1 (the Wedabo Chiefdom is in this District), which Doris Ylatun wants to represent in the House of Representatives beginning from 2017.
“I am the only female Representative Aspirant of Electoral District # 1 and the only choice and hope of the people of the District come October 2017 Presidential and General elections,” Doris Ylatun declares to me on June 10 in Barclayville, where she lives.
“I know the District’s problems more than any of my political opponents does, on my being here, since 2002,” she adds.
Doris, the third child of six children, is the only female aspirant in a group of seventeen legislative contestants for District #1 of Grand Kru County.
Each of Doris’ political opponents has written her off for the Capitol Building—Liberia’s hottest rendezvous for political juggernauts—on her political inexperience.
She has never indulged in any serious political venture; her shot for 2017 is her first attempt at politics.
But she argues that she has the lobbying power to develop District #1 than any of her political opponents who are bragging about being “experienced politician,” boasts Doris, a product from the union of Mr. Daniel Ylatun (deceased) and Madam Esther Nyan.
“On lobby by me, bridges and culverts were constructed in Wedabo, Genoyah, Barclayville and Picnicess communities,” she read out some of her works on a long list.
“Let each of these people describing my knowledge of politics as inexperience come out and tell the people of District number one what he has done for the people, compared to what I have done.”
Other projects, she mentioned, include: Barclayville Market, latrines and hand pumps in Buah Geeken, Camp Three (in Barclayville), Wahkpeken, Planplanken, Kladia and Kunia communities.
I asked Doris about her educational footprints?
“Construction of schools in several communities including Picnic Cess Public School in Picnic Cess, George Toe Washington School in Barclayville, Glebo Junior High School in Glebo, Trehn Statutory District,” responded the soft-speaking mother of three on other projects on ground for critics and doubters to see.
The absence of machinery restricted her road project to “road-side brushing” by mobilized community members, she said.
Agricultural projects “in all communities in Grand Kru,” Doris brags, are also on the development menu.
With the support of some local and international NGOs, Ms. Ylatun has “been identifying parts of Grand Kru without a school building, a clinic, a market—and other community projects I mentioned earlier—and to construct it,” Doris recalled.
Her membership of five local development-centered NGOs, all in the southeastern Liberia, has facilitated her tour across the region to know what facility was absent in a community and how to provide it.
Two of Southeastern Women Development Association, where she served as County Coordinator; and Barpupolabo Village and Saving Loan Association, where her position was Chairperson.
Each of Doris’ political opponents is boasting of only his support to construction of community hand pumps, supplies of drugs to Town’s clinic, or supply of aluminum roofing sheets to at least one community school.
Other critics harp on Doris being an introvert or can’t-talk-plenty nature.
“We don’t want a person who won’t be vocal in the House on deliberating the Wedabo issues,” Mr. Peter Jeh, one of Doris political opponents, who didn’t want his name appear in this story, charged to me in Zoloken.
“Good leadership isn’t about loud talking,” Doris reacted against this opinion, at another interview.
“It is action that gets the people’s work done, not talking,” The soft-speaking mother three children.
Each of the political opponents of Doris Ylatun, who has an Associate Degree in Management from the Lincoln Commercial Institute, in Monrovia, has a ‘political experience’ by virtue of his former or present work.
Some of the things Doris plans to do for District #1, if elected Representative, are: Lobby with Ministry of Education and partners for the construction of libraries in junior schools and laboratory equipment to schools and to upgrade one junior high school each in Wedaboo, Behwan and Garraway to full senior high level; lobby with other soap factories for the construction of soap factory in the district as a means of providing for the district’s people; the provision of safe drinking water in all towns and villages in District #1; and to lobby for the construction of magisterial court to improve the justice system in the district.
On personal education, Doris Nyanplane Ylatun says she’s blessed on being an educated woman (with a college degree) from a part of Liberia where majority of school-age women do not go beyond junior high school level (9th Grade) due to parents’ coercion for farm works for the school-age girl, forced early marriage, husbands lack of interest for educating their illiterate wives; and education advocates’ fear of challenging a culture that restricts women to the farm work or the kitchen.
“We should encourage and support our girls or women to go to school, so that they will contribute to community’s development, and to compete with men for Presidential or legislative positions,” Ms. Ylatun advised representatives of chieftaincies and youth leaderships of the Wedabo Chiefdom in Zoloken on June 9.
The political road to the Capitol Building (House of Representatives) of Liberia is politically and culturally bumpy for Ms. Doris Nyanplane Ylatun.
“With my development track records I can traverse this uneven road,” she said to me during an interview on June 22 in Monrovia, where she was for a program.
Report by Samuel G. Dweh, a journalist, fiction writer and author, is an indigene of the Wedabo tribe of Grand Kru County of Liberia. He is a member of the Press Union of Liberia (PUL) and the Liberia Association of Writers (LAW). He can be reached via: (+231) 886-618-906/776-583-266; [email protected])