The Editor,
Put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary Liberian who struggled through more than fourteen years of very brutal civil conflicts.
You saw your village, town or city get burned down to ashes and members of your immediate and/or extended family raped, maimed or killed by little boys and girls, some of whom were barely of age to hold a weapon in their hands. You were not one of those who had the fortunate chance to escape and find refuge in one of the advanced nations in North America or Europe where everything that makes life a little easier and more tolerable is available.
Then the war ended and the very first civilian government was elected into office (in December 2015). To add honey to a chocolate candy bar (if I may use the phrase), Liberia elected its and Africa’s very first female president in the person of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
So hopes for a better future were very high at that point because everyone, including you, had good reason to believe that after a hideous and very destructive war that took the lives of nearly 300,000 Liberians, the new national leadership now had the perfect chance to chart a brand new course for the nation – to move it far, far away from its corrupt and decadent past. In short, the opportunities for a “fresh start” for a blighted nation and society abounded to near limitlessness.
The new administration assumed office (in January 2006) and the very first thing it began to do to lay the foundation for the workforce that would begin the painful and difficult task of rebuilding the completely ruined nation was to import Liberians who had spent countless years living overseas (mainly in the United States of America) – including those who ran away from the country during those bloody years of civil war. Never mind Liberia’s long history of putting foreign-based (especially US-based) Liberians in positions of power only to discover time and again that those individuals’ sole goal was/is to enrich themselves and their friends and relatives by stealing from the national coffers.
The new post-civil war administration not only imported Liberians from the US and Europe but it paid (and to this day still pays) them exorbitant salaries and benefits – in most cases salaries and benefits those individuals never ever earned or could even ever dream of earning in the US or Europe when they lived there!
And as though their huge over-inflated salaries and benefits are/were not enough, the imported hands (mainly top level government employees) are once again head-over-heels engaged in illegally and improperly enriching themselves at an even more intensified pace this time than ever before in the recent history of the nation.
Never mind the fact that the newly elected President, Mrs. Sirleaf, declared in her first inaugural speech (in January 2006) that corruption would be “public enemy one number” for her administration.
The new leader not only did (and to this day does) absolutely nothing about corruption and not only did not (and up to now does not) seek to hold accountable those who engage or are alleged to have engaged in acts of corruption and illegal and improper self-enrichment behavior, she herself and her immediate and extended family members routinely and without the slightest sense of guilt or second thought engage in those very same or similar acts.
Eric S Kaba, CPA
[email protected]