Monrovia – The Concessions Working Group (CWG) has for the recalibration of cross-sectoral interactions. CWG believes there is a pressing need to recalibrate policy interactions between the third sector and government.
Such a recalibration, it thinks, should evolve more nuanced and collaborative problem-solving efforts on critical national issues as land reform, concession processes and conflict mitigation rather than the traditional antagonism and ascription of faults for failed policies.
The group also wants a broadened space for national conversation in which diversifies actors involved with critical conversations regarding national policy formulation and implementation, especially in the natural resource sector, can regularly meet for an analytical review.
It says such an approach will encompass not only the generic traditional political and third sector actors but also include outfits such as the various professional unions (labor, teachers, artists etc.) and lower level community-based organizations.
The CWG position was contained in a press statement released at the end of an assembly in Buchanan, Grand Bassa County from March 18-19 to broadly review individual and collective work implemented in 2015 and assess areas of value addition to the governance conversation and qualitatively gauge its impact on the natural resource sector.
It wants government evolves a holistic post-UNMIL security sector strategy, which will not include only governmental actors but also representatives from the third sector.
Such a strategy, it believes, must see specific attention and resources (intellectual and capital) directed towards developing and communicating a holistic security sector management strategy in light of the ongoing drawdown and the increase in violent conflicts in/around concession communities.
Speaking to FrontPageAfrica recently, Larmii Kpargoi disclosed that much needs to be done as Liberians gear-up for next year’s Presidential and legislative elections.
“The CWG has achieved a lot. Over the past year, working as individual organization and the consortium, the organization was able to send a mission out to different concession areas in the country to do assessments of mob violence that had happened, especially like in Nimba County.
“And as a result of that assessment mission, the CWG was able to inform itself of different situations happening in concessions especially as it relates to labor disputes, mob violence and human rights violations. So the organization’s constituent elements were able to respond to these things, respond to government and the concessionaires.
“Looking forward, the CWG decided that considering the fact that the United Nations mission is on the winding down in Liberia, we have to like recalibrate the discussion around the concession sector, the natural resource sector.”
“We need to include more people in these discussions not necessarily those who live and work in these concessions,” said Kpargoi, executive director of the Liberia Media Center.
The CWG is a network of local and international nongovernmental organizations working on the extractives sector. It is supported by TrustAfrica, a pan-African foundation based in Senegal and the United States. The members of the CWG work on thematic areas such as human rights, peace-building and governance.
The coalition seeks to influence national policies in Liberia so that equal access and benefits of the State’s natural resources is assured and achieved for the most vulnerable segments of the Liberian population.
The two-day process, which was one of critical self-reflections, endeavored to answer questions of whether programs, advocacies and strategies being utilized were timely and helpful as well as whether alternative strategies could be employed to engage the natural resource debate in order to yield significant gains. The process also sought to unpack the overall challenges that confronted the group and to identify specific prospects and opportunities for quick policy wins.
All of these conversations were conducted with the full realization of the many nexuses which exist between poor governance of the natural resource sector and conflict, underdevelopment as well as religious radicalism.
At the close of gathering, the CWG identified the following strands as areas needing critical attention not only from individual actors within the group but also from the government and all relevant policy-makers within the public policy arena.