THE EDITOR,
What good is a democracy when its Judicial System vomits and eats what it vomited or stops its previous ruling? Now I see why the United States has slapped travel restrictions to the US on the conflicted Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Liberia, Francis Kporkpor.
Now I see why Cape Mount County Senator Varney Sherman was slapped with sanctions by the US Treasury Department recently for corruption for allegedly trying to sell iron ore-rich Wologizi Mountain in Lofa County for a reported $950,000.00 and Sherman’s predicted subsequent acquittal of “not guilty” by the unSupremely judgment by our Supreme Court.
The United States government has constantly accused our courts/judges of accepting bribes to rule in cases over the years.
Flushed with $950,000.00 from a rouge British company, Sable Mining, then lawyer Varney Sherman assured his client Sable Mining that he needed the money to bribe government officials including lawmakers to change Liberia’s existing mining laws to favor Sable Mining in a no-bid deal to get Wologizi, estimated to be worth billions of dollars.
With money in hand as his case went before the Supreme Court of Liberia, lawyer Sherman boasted and described the corrupt Liberian judiciary this way: “the Liberian court system/judiciary is like a river with plenty of fish in it; I was born in that river as a fish and I know how to navigate my way through that river,” the Harvard University law school graduate said before his corruption trial began True indeed, our Supreme Court found Cllr. Varney “Perry Mason” Sherman “not guilty” of corruption and of attempting to sell his country’s natural resources for pennies. Thanks to collaboration between global philanthropist-billionaire Dr. George Soros’ Global Witness and US Treasury Department dirty money hunters for putting the brakes on Sherman and Sable Mining.
Unless Lofa County Senator-elect Brownie Samukai is willing to dish out dirty corruption money to the powers-that-be, in both the Executive and Judiciary, sorry, but Samukai may be swept downstream of the of corruption court river and may end up on some officials’ dinner plate.
But when our highest court’s justices are playing these dirty games, they fail to realize that their decisions are the prime drivers of potential foreign investors staying away from Liberia. But blindly, government operatives tend to blame their usual suspects: the opposition and the Press.
In 2013, this very Supreme Court sentenced FrontPageAfrica newspaper journalist and publisher Rodney Sieh to the equivalent of 5,000 years in jail. Rodney Sieh’s “crime?: He published the government’s independent audit report by the General Auditing Commission (GAC) that accused forner Agriculture Minister Chris Toe of misappropriating millions of dollars meant to fight a batch of army worms that had destroyed food crops and contaminated drinking water and rivers in Bong and Nimba Counties. Mr. Sieh spent a month in jail before he was released after an international outcry and protests against the corruot regime of former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, ironically, a Nobel “PEACE” Prize winner.
If Brownie Samukai had run on the ticket of the ruling CDC Party, then certainly we won’t be going through this dance where the Court somersaults on its previous decision in declaring Samukai winner in the Lofa senatorial elections….and now says not yet until…?
But then this is Liberia and why we are Africa’s first failed experiment at democracy 174 years and counting….and why we fought a bloody civil war for 14 years that killed 250,000 Liberians. We seem not to learn any lessons from our recent bloodbath. The Supreme Court and others in our government are inviting a replay of our violent past, it seems. Only animals eat their own vomit. Just a thought and not a sermon.
Jerry Wehtee Wion
Washington, DC, USA