Monrovia – As election process draws closer, many political analysts have called for political parties in the country to form a merger so as to reject the third term bid of the ruling Unity Party.
Report by J.H. Webster Clayeh – [email protected]
“We must unite and fight them. We don’t want war here in our country. How can we fight them? Vote them out, we must disgrace them this 2017.
I don’t care if you vote for me but never vote for anybody in this government or associate themselves with this government”- Benoni Urey, political leader, All Liberian Party
Amid reports that talks of collaboration are ongoing between opposition political parties, the political leader of the All Liberian Party (ALP), Benoni Urey, has reaffirmed his call to all opposition political parties to unite against what he called one common enemy.
“We must unite and fight them. We don’t want war here in our country. How can we fight them?
Vote them out, we must disgrace them this 2017. I don’t care if you vote for me but never vote for anybody in this government or associate themselves with this government.”
He continued: “This election you must be a watchdog. They are coming again to cheat. They are using government’s property and government resources. They are taking money from agencies of government to finance their convention.
They starting again—all of us must voice out a resounding no to this one group of people. It must come to an end and we must unite—whether you from ALP, CDC, NPP, NDPL MPC all of us must unite to fight our common enemy”.
CDC and NPP makeup ALP
Mr. Urey, who has been a strong supporter of the National Patriotic Party (NPP), campaigned and voted for the main opposition political party, the Congress of Democratic Change (CDC), during the 2011 election said his party is a makeup of the CDC and NPP.
“I have always been a supporter of NPP, but also I have always been a supporter of CDC. You know why, because CDC and NPP represent the suffering masses in Liberia. And what is ALP? ALP is a combination of all these people”, he added.
We will spoil it
The ALP political leader further warned of the propaganda used in the 2011 elections.
“They starting their propaganda machine again but you know we sounding all this warning to them, there will be no 2011 in this country again because if they want spoil it, we will spoil it”.
“My people, nobody has monopoly on political manipulation. So, if they start it this 2017, you know 2011 they almost had radio Kigali, they starting small, small again, it will not happen this time”, he warned.
The ALP political leader continued “The only thing we ask of our president is to ensure that we have peace and stability during this election period.
The second thing is to ensure that we have a free, fair and transparent election. We want no legacy from her; we want that to be her legacy. The will of the Liberian people must be respected.’’
Urey Rejects Prime FM Reporter
At the beginning of the interactive forum, the ALP political leader rejected a reporter of Prime FM radio station from covering him because, according to him, the radio station is always in the support of the bid of vice president Joseph Boakai.
“Where are you from? I don’t want you to record me”, he said.
He continued: “When you have a media institution that continues to misrepresent and misinterpret facts, you don’t want it to continue. And we don’t want a media institution that always promoting government and castigating other people”.
There continue to be collaboration talks between political parties but it seems none of the politicians are willing to go second to the other.
Similar talks of opposition collaboration in 2011 between George Weah of the CDC and Charles Brumskine of the Liberty Party failed and Weah ended up contesting with Cllr. Winston Tubman as the CDC standard bearer.
Even President Sirleaf has cautioned that no political party is capable of singlehandedly winning the pending election admonishing collaboration between political parties.
“I don’t think any political party can win on its own giving the number of parties. So, if you see people negotiating, dialoguing it is because that they have all realized that some coalition has to be made for a particular party or parties to be successful”, President Sirleaf said recently in a FrontPageAfrica interview.
2 dozen parties; under 2 million votes
But beneath the speculations lay the hard truth that Liberia, a country of four and a half million people is approaching the two dozen mark for political parties with a fewer percentage voter registration record.
In 2011, 1,798,930, one million, seven hundred, ninety eight thousand, nine hundred and thirty Liberians registered to vote while in 2005, 1,252, 730 (one million, two hundred fifty two thousand, seven hundred and thirty Liberians registered to vote, according to the institute for democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2005, 22 candidates contested the Presidential elections while 16 candidates contest the presidency in the 2011 Presidential elections.
In 1997, the elections that brought Charles Taylor to power saw 13 candidates eyeing the presidency. Chapter 8.1 of the guidelines of the National Elections Commission stipulates that registered political parties may be allowed to merge or consolidate.
