Poor Healthcare System Is Why Liberia Fits “Failed State” Label

The Editor,

The families ( of Mr. Lawrence Gross & Mrs. Shelley K. Gross) can seek an independent second opinion or hire another reputable pathologist, say from the United States so that the hired Nigerian pathologist’s findings can be put to the test. It is also good to get a second or third opinion to put all doubts to rest.

And this quandary of a poor national healthcare system also speaks to why Liberia fits the label of a “failed state.” That an entirely sovereign state that was given over US $1 billion to upgrade its healthcare system two years ago in the wake of the Ebola epidemic does not have its own medical pathologist speaks volumes.

It means the Police/government does not have the ability to scientifically solve major crimes and questionable deaths where the cause of death becomes a guessing game like the deaths of this young couple from America What a national disgrace?

Yet, there are many college dropouts, some literally functional literates in government earning outrageous salaries of anywhere between US $100,000.00 to over $400,000.00 a year, but there is not a single medical doctor in Liberia perhaps earning anything close to US$100,000.00 a year.

I challenge the government to prove me wrong. Thus, issues of life and death matters surrounding suspicious crimes and or deaths go unsolved only to fuel the ever-present Liberian rumor mill of EL-THEY-SAY.

And after 11years in office with one year left, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s two top spin masters–Presidential Press Secretary J. Piah and Minister of Information and Propaganda Eugene Nagbe–last week were gloating about the “progress and accomplishments” of the Sirleaf regime. Liberia is doomed.

But President Sirleaf and the top cronies in her government have not had their blood pressure checked at any government funded medical center in Liberia; they all run to America and Europe each year for the best care money can buy, spending their people’s money.

This takes me back to my other recent comments that President Sirleaf’s oldest sister Jenny is both National Coordinator of Liberia’s health industries and Chairman, Board of Directors of the neglected government funded John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, the main public referral medical center in Liberia.

This is the level to which Liberians have been reduced by a government that raised the hopes and aspirations of not only Liberians, but Africans and the worlld in general—President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is Liberia and Africa’s first woman president.

But Piah and Nagbe saw in Ellen the political messiah who has delivered Liberians to the Promised Land of everything desired and promised to Liberians in 2005 when she campaigned for the presidency: safe drinking water, electricity, good healthcare system, good all weather roads, good schools and good paying jobs where “Papa would come home from work with his bags full with food and goodies to make the family whole again and restore the long lost smiles of war battered children,” she promised the world in the presence of American First Lady Laura Bush and former Presidential National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice.

And Liberians are returning to the same rituals this year known as presidential elections and none of the nearly 20 candidates can promise Liberians that if elected, he/she would conduct a comprehensive audit of President Sirleaf and her entire government of 12 years.

We hope incoming US President Donald Trump will put a pause on American tax dollars to Liberia until following a full audit of the billions of dollars the American government has given to Liberia since the 14-year Liberian civil war ended in 2003.

If President Trump thinks there is swamp in Washington that needs draining only, he needs to drain the Liberian swamp which has been sucking American tax dollars since 1847, some 170 years now. President Trump will find out that some the political crocodiles in the Liberian swamp some have found their way to America with the stolen money meant help the poor in Liberia. Go get them Donald. I am mad because my tax dollars are unaccounted for also in Liberia.

Jerry Wehtee Wion, Washington, DC, USA