A group of young Liberian professionals interested in research invited me to speak to them. I chose to reflect the nation’s emerging culture of scholarly research. I drew on my experience administering a Liberian-led think tank in the homeland over the last two years. I defined the problem as follows:

1) an underdeveloped infrastructure/culture of scholarly research;

2) low priority given to scholarly research;

3) limited or no funding or moral support provided to scholarly research;

4) academics or university faculty generally not expected to produce empirical knowledge;

5) research/publication not often tabulated in advancement of academics;

6) seeming absence of national research agenda;

7) youth not often trained, mentored, and supported to pursue careers as researchers;

8) academics not given ample incentives to conduct scholarly research;

9) research done are often foreign-led, and seldom emphasize building and mainstreaming indigenous knowledge;

10) minimal or no research partnerships exist between university and industry;

11) research findings are prone to being politicized;

12) a seeming culture of convenience dominates, where academics rely heavily on regurgitating existing; and

13) universities are underdeveloped and the higher education institution accreditation process is weak, causing proliferation of sub-standard higher education institutions and underprepared graduates. This is not a research-based article. It is informed exclusively by personal observations, which require empirical validation.   

It might just not be an over estimation to say that many of our higher education institutions are largely “glorified high schools” producing many poor performing or uncompetitive graduates. In my own practice, this assertion has proven true.

But all the solutions to our national problems rest heavily on the state of scholarly research – our failing social fabric (weak communal family system), endemic corruption, deepening economic and unemployment crisis, deteriorating education and healthcare delivery systems, this subject must claim national attention as the nation makes its pending critical transition.

What is happening in our higher education system also mirrors what is occurring in our primary and secondary schools, partially reflected in the persistent mass failure of applicants in college entrance exams.   

We have no longitudinal data banks on our national problems that can be used to conduct scholarly research and apply the findings to management and governance decisions. If I were to ask: Is Liberia getting better or worse, many people would rely on hearsay, antidotes, conjectures, hunches, and speculations to superficially compare a despotic government to a democratic one.

I should note that in qualitative research, instincts can be used to form hypothesis in exploratory studies. But with many people being basic in their thought processes in a largely illiterate society, they are likely to get nostalgic for previous regimes (failed or successful) and suggest that one is better than the other devoid of context or empirical evidence.

Put differently, could this “data-less” environment be producing the kind of pettiness and triviality that we see over taking our society today? Because the country lacks large data bases to be mined for scholarly research it might just be resulting in heavy reliance on data collected and mined by international organizations, information that might be stripped of keen understanding of the cultural context. Without scholarly research rooted in the context, governance becomes rudderless.

The prospect of governance improving the livelihoods of citizens becomes remote and/or abysmal. Without scholarly research, we cannot understand the socioeconomic conditions that ail us collectively. Our criticisms of society become based on perceptions of reality. It is of strategic importance that as a people we develop better research institutions, better data, improve our analytical tools, and increase the number of trained researchers. 

Research is a life changing enterprise. The future of our society depends on whether its governance is guided by empirical evidence on the variety of issues that it confronts.

When society has a system for collecting and updating data regularly, the possibility of change becomes possible because no “data-less” society can make durable progress.

If policies are to be effectively executed, Liberia must become a data-driven society. This will change our civilization radically. Our leaders will be elected on the basis of evidence of their impact on the living conditions of the citizens in prior positions.

And when we compare their legacies, we will do so objectively rather than on mere whims. We need to build data repositories on different sectors of the society, which can be the basis for research and decision making. Sadly, our media, even academics have become victims of functioning in a “data-less” society where the intellectual tradition is sparse.

You can read a whole news story without finding the evidence backing the narrative or the conclusions reached. Some journalists rely on innuendoes, even half-truths and then tarnish the reputations of individuals. Some professionals rely on single or shallow interpretations of events and/or things that go wrong without fact-checking or they do not go back to history to see how far society has come.

Also, we have many instances in which our academics do not conduct research, but rather continue to parrot information from other sources, sometimes without giving the authors credit. Worse, when research is done, the results are often politicized to please the whims of individuals or political aims. All these factors undermine the building of a durable research culture. 

Access to accurate data makes scientific breakthrough possible. Political and civil liberties are at the heart of our development, especially as a fragile society transitioning from war to peace and democracy. But we do not have standardized ways of measuring improvements in our political and civil liberties. We do not have indexes that measure these important variables.

We therefore set our thresholds for such important issues as poverty using external standards. Hence, many of our standards do not reflect local realities. When a society is not driven by data, it cannot make adequate projections into the future. When unexamined questions or dimensions of society are left unexplored, we risk building a dysfunctional state. The simple reason is that information about today tells something about the future.

In the end, it will be a huge deal for us to take the making of data seriously. By doing so, we will be taking the arts and craft of research seriously, even making it indispensable to good governance.  Unless and until Liberian society combines the natural sciences, social sciences and the arts in a bid to enable new technologies to address its wide-ranging socioeconomic problems, it will not build the smart enterprises or unfold bold innovations to confront chronic diseases, poor governance or even endemic corruption.   

Data is created in Liberian society every day and it is everywhere around us. Data is created in how we live, work, travel, purchase goods and services, attend school, play or are unable to do these things. But we lack interest in capturing and understanding it and translating our findings into new knowledge that can transform our livelihoods.

Research must be definitely prioritized, if we want to leave our current state of backwardness behind. In our National Community Perception Study on Ebola as well as other research with ordinary Liberians, we have learned that they have a rich reservoir of indigenous knowledge that has gone untapped in public policy development. Their perceptions need to be studied and lessons learned mainstreamed and transformed into public policy/programs.

The infrastructure for funded scholarly research has to be developed and supported including building competencies in grant writing and the various tricks of the trade amongst our youthful populations. We need to increase opportunities for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarly research and publications in academic journals and the popular press. Funding incentives for researchers need to be increased and procured from diverse sources.

Many low cost inventions or innovations by Liberians need to be improved and commercialized so that the larger society can derive maximum benefits. Scholarly research constitutes a heartbeat of our recovery, development, productivity, progress, and prosperity.

We cannot rely on existing rudimentary academic and research systems, structures, and practices and expect to develop our education systems or governance institutions. Leveraging scholarly research as a strategic national asset will help commit us as a people, our leaders included, to backing up our actions with evidence, while improving our collective livelihoods. 

The Author

Emmanuel Dolo is the President/CEO of the Center for Liberia’s Future, a Liberian-led think-tank that is currently conducting a National Community Perception Study on the Spread and Containment of Ebola during the 2014-2015 epic epidemic as well as the Reintegration Experiences of Ebola Survivors, Orphans and Caregivers and Post-Ebola Preparedness. CFLF has also conducted studies on the livelihood challenges of drug-involved/street youth, job creation for marginalized populations, and an assessment of extra-curricular education programs in Liberia. CFLF researches and mainstreams indigenous knowledge originating from the Mano River Basin. emmanueldolo80@yahoo.com.

Could the seeming pervasive college-for-all mindset, which relegates entrepreneurial, vocational, and other technical training as dumping ground for youth perceived as being underachievers, underserved, and having uneducated parents be pursuing the wrong development goal?

Could it be increasing the inequity in the society because the education and relevant policy in different sectors are not aligned to attend to the targeted needs of the most vulnerable populations? Does the present education system induce risk among the youth underclass in ways that positions them not to be absorbed in an industrialized economy? 

The Liberian education system has faced many challenges over its lifetime. As a consequence, learning outcomes in general, have been largely poor, although not completely. Minor exceptions have existed in some schools.

Parents and guardians with the requisite financial resources have been able to access schools with updated facilities and modern curriculum, quality teachers, instructional leadership, libraries, laboratories, computer labs, after school and parent involvement programs, which have made beneficiaries competitive. Nonetheless, poor Liberian youth, those constituting the youth underclass have been relegated to schools that suffer immense neglect. 

Schools in urban and rural communities with no or sub-standard/inadequate toilets, libraries, science laboratories, high student to teacher ratio, and poor school completion rates are notably higher in numbers. Education in these schools has had the tendency to put these youth at a significant disadvantage. Even if they have closer proximity to schools with better resources and facilities, they are usually unable to access them because of financial and other constraints.

The exception is where poor students receive scholarships to attend these better resourced schools. The longer such conditions have lasted, the society has not been able to redress the disparities caused, leading to possible intergenerational poverty or class immobility. Liberia’s future public policies, education policy being in the forefront, must break with vicious cycle.   

In recent months, I have been working with a group of boys who hail from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some of the characteristics that they share are fatherlessness, little or no aspiration, uncertainty, and worse, the schools that they attended are still a cross between a psychiatric ward and a prison. It was difficult to receive good education there, even if you imported the best teachers.

The textbooks were outdated and the classrooms without fitting furniture. These features are reportedly responsible for these youth developing now into young men living in marginalized settings.

They started work life early on in their development peddling goods in the informal sector. Some are parts of a cohort negatively characterized as “zogos” (street-absorbed/drug dependent youth) in Liberian society. Many of their relatives have been in and out of jail.

Those who work are still poor because their salaries are decided arbitrarily by the employers especially since they do not have the requisite skills and qualifications to access better jobs. And even if they do, which is quite rare, the job market is biased toward the privileged classes. These combinations, broken homes, poor schools, and widespread stigma can only cultivate the roots of underachievement and underclass life. 

Given that good education, especially the one with a solid pre-k foundation is considered crucial to facilitating intergenerational class mobility, it is about time for the future government to set its policy focus on pre-k reform.

There has been some redress in the educational disparities in the public education system since the current government took office. School facilities have been built in many places around the country and access has increased. But such access has not been to better quality schools remain.

If this trend spills over into the new government, poverty will persist. As a remedy, the economic and education policies of the next government must be aligned to forge a pro-poor nexus. Post-war Liberian society will have to transform a certain percentage of its population into educated and contributing citizens to enable the building of structures that catalyze industrialization. But if failure and mediocrity are entrenched in the schools and larger society, so too will be persistent poverty.  

The current government should underscore its achievement of near universal enrollment, as a significant feat. This is so given the abysmal educational sector that it inherited after the protracted civil carnage and devastation.

The education system has come a long way in rectifying some of the ills that were caused by the war and previous systemic neglect for certain segments of the population. What it has yet not made up for in large measure is the stark gaps in the quality of teachers, facilities, other physical resources, and school management/counseling capacities.

Addressing these issues have proven to be more daunting, partly attributed to poor funding mechanisms and sluggish national education sector leadership. Outsourcing public education is not proving as a sustainable remedy especially when student achievement data from the recently privatized public schools have yet to be provided to the larger society for empirical study. Worse, the lives and future of Liberian youth cannot be used as experimental sites for new ideas over a long period.

In the absence of validated data on overall expenditure per learner, one is left to wonder if our national education leaders have optimized investments in the sector to enable a closing of the achievement gap between poorer and richer students. Backlogs of problems from the pre-war and warring years must be mitigated with purposeful strategies to foster the requisite changes in the intergenerational socio-economic immobility that were engendered.

Emphasis must be placed on the fragility of the communal family system, which played myriad of roles in buffering disadvantaged persons in their social unit against hardship. A post-war family policy and strategic plan is required in the wake of these challenges to rectify and redress the ill-effects of the civil war. 

It will be quite important in the new administration to revisit how schools are funded and to examine whether or not equity is promoted intentionally. Unless the education system holistically prepares our students or learners for appropriate transition to work or higher education, it is failing to achieve a vital mission. By doing so, education policy contributes to structural exclusion of citizens from the mainstream economy, which in turn entrenches intergenerational poverty.

Sadly, those affected the most by lack of alignment between economic and education policies are those who live in poor urban communities and remote and rural areas constituting the underclass. No longer, can the society allow its citizens, especially the underclass to be trapped in intergenerational poverty and expect its unemployment and crime rates to improve, or for its poverty reduction strategy to make meaningful impact. These factors are mutually reinforcing. 

The growth of the informal sector is quite startling. Indicators, although unscientific, include the seeming accelerated increase in the number of young children selling goods in the streets and apparent growth in the numbers of drug dependent/addicted youth living in the streets, trapped in impoverishment.

They live in communities where most residents cannot be absorbed by the workforce or are unemployable – a phenomenon that is structural because of the mismatch, between skills that these Liberians have, if any, and the employment opportunities that the market offers.

The youth underclass is therefore the result of the growing skill requirements of the formal economy, which is setting them apart from the rest of the youth cohort, especially when job creation is not purposefully focused on the needs of the underclass. Unless the new government develops policies to reintegrate the youth underclass into mainstream society, it risks creating a ready-made pool that would be tapped easily for illicit purposes: crime and war making, included. 

In Liberian society, we have often wondered about the causes of the deviant behaviors of the zogos and other disadvantaged young people. We have not gauged the structural issues responsible for their plight.

Terms such as “zogos and zogese” are therefore loaded with class-based discriminatory connotations and stigma, forgetting how socioeconomic neglect has been a key culprit in causing their underlying conditions. Unless our education, economic, justice, health, youth development, labor, and social policies converge in ways where awareness of the structural forces that generate the underclass are heightened and targeted for durable mitigation, intergenerational poverty will thrive. 

But then again, in a society where empirical data is lacking in many cases for policy decision making, it is difficult to disrupt negative trends and tendencies due to the intellectual laziness of some policy makers and professionals.

Given Liberia’s sparse research tradition and how easily research findings touch a raw nerve (quick politicization), it is not difficult to explain why many of the core problems facing the society merge and become enormously difficult to resolve. Leaders rely on antidotal evidence as opposed to their rigorous empirical counterparts.

For example, the gap between the nation’s wealthy and acutely poor is often mentioned in most policy discussions. But the issues frequently left unexplored are the structural forces that are beyond the control of the poor. Public policy makers must inquire vigorously about how this structurally positions our underserved students in ways that lead to underachievement, drop-out, street life, addiction, crime, and imprisonment. 

In the new era, the persistence of poverty enabled by structural conditions must be taken seriously and analyzed to find empirical evidence that can guide policy, practice, and future research. Policy makers and professionals must absorb these harsh realities with considerable maturity and not resort to unwarranted self-interested defensiveness and political posturing. Only then can durable solutions be found to the nation’s difficult problems.  

If policy makers keenly understand the education challenges facing the youth underclass, it might be a viable reference point for more durable solutions to the widespread poverty problem. We must dismantle the outdated ways underserved youth are prepared for education and transitioned to work by paying special attention to the labor market requirements of the low manufacturing society, which Liberia has been made into.

The society is not dominated by jobs that require high tech labor as yet, although in the future, post-secondary credentials will be required as the labor market graduates into industrialization. But for now, the fastest growing occupations in the society appear to be service sector and entrepreneurial jobs those that require less than a college degree.

No doubt, college education has the power to enhance job opportunities; but key drivers of the Liberian economy in its present state ought to be studied carefully to devise relevant strategies for sustainable change. 

I end with this Ethiopian proverb: “When spiders unite they can tie down a lion.

”When Liberians unite we can end all of our most daunting governance challenges. 

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer 

More than anything else, the momentous event in Liberia’s 170 years of independence will be the Presidential election. The need to create a political system characterized by pluralism and civility is palpable.

The need to infuse our political life with self-respect and respect of others is vital, even indispensable to the consolidation of peace.  

Unfortunately, in this election year, the Liberian political system is showing significant signs of heightened strains, disorganization, declining citizens’ confidence and worse, rising polarization. The focus is not on promoting positive policy changes or protecting national security and maintaining the gains in development.  

Institutions and institutional actors are at loggerheads with one another. Words like bipartisanship, compromise, and serving the best interests of the people are becoming less and less parts of our national narratives.

As such, new ideas are not being cultivated, harnessed and bred into our governance systems and structures. Outdated policies and structures are therefore being normalized or recycled. 

The time has come for a sort of rethinking to determine how this period of frenzy and seeming disorganization can be repaired and remedied. I propose a model of “statesmanship and Stewardship” as a way of resolving what is becoming a crisis with the potential to undermine the peace. 

The current example is the impasse between the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. Yes! We have seen such heated rhetoric between members of the legislature before, one which resulted in the previous Speaker of the House of Representatives stepping down. 

But the recent talk of the House of Representatives impeaching three members of the Supreme Court Bench and the counterweight of the Supreme Court Justices citing the House of Representatives, particularly its Judicial Committee in a heated political season does not portend well for a fragile society a little over one month before a critical Presidential/legislative elections that is the fulcrum of peace consolidation. 

These are not ordinary times. The forthcoming elections are extremely vital, because all of the gains made in democracy, peace, reconciliation and development hinge on it.

At this juncture, need exists for show of statesmanship and stewardship, even trans-partisanship in the behavior of our leaders. We expect our leaders to be forging allies from the political left and right or liberal, progressive, and conservative spectrum into a centrist coalition. 

Essentially, the country needs a new form of partisanship that is aimed at harnessing the best the country has to offer and not its worst values, tendencies, behaviors, and actions.

Governance decisions should transcend politics and be aimed at finding common policy solutions so that the proponents can garner legitimacy whether or not they come from the left or right of the political field. 

It seems that the country is suffering from the absence of a cohort of statesman or sensible policy stewards. We need a group of statesmen and stewards who can take time to understand how each governance action they take influences the peace, stability, and security of the state and its citizens. 

It is time to make personal relationships the lubricant, which allows appropriate governance to occur and be sustained. Leaders in these trying times should be curious, open-minded, respectful of one another, and firmly grounded in the belief that the well-being of their fellow citizens is the basis upon which they were awarded leadership positions. 

The war of words is not virtuous. The gridlock or acting like they live in alternative universes as opposed to forging coalitions and finding networked solutions to our problems is destructive. They need to reshape their behaviors.

The impeachment tough talk ought to end, just as the citation of the legislature needs to end immediately. These mutual provocative actions are precursors to conflict, even crisis that present a posture of our leaders, which does not look civilized.  

These same attributes: curiosity, open-mindedness, mutual respect, and patriotism are the qualities essential for media practitioners, academics, and civic leaders (in non-governmental and religious organizations). Liberians of all backgrounds must cross superficial partisan, cultural, and professional boundaries or divides in times like these to ensure that the best interest of the citizenry is served. 

It is no time for scoring tactical victory at the expense of the common good. This is no time for superficial ideological struggles which could derail the society and bring about setbacks that will take generations to repair.

Having these important public roles come with the responsibility to uphold basic rules of civility. It is undeniable that the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives have leading roles in governance. They cannot achieve their roles independently, but interdependently. 

Leadership is not a zero-sum interest, but a positive-sum interest. Aggressive tendencies must be moderated by leaders, no matter which sphere they serve, in order to excel to statesmanship and stewardship.

These two institutions are wedded together by their common interest in protecting the security of the state. They therefore cannot be acting in ways where the other sees each as wanting to topple it. It is in my view, this paralyzing fear, which lies at the root of the problem at hand. 

A Liberia where statesmen lead is one where coalitions are built to solve the nation’s biggest or core problems amicably.

It is a society where constructive political engagement occurs; adversaries tone down their bombastic rhetoric; and do not hurl insults at one another; and cooler heads prevail.

We are a fragile society. Differences among our leaders should be resolved away from the limelight peacefully. If left unresolved, it is the electorate that suffers.

The period when warlords showed off their strengths and doubled down on showing off the weaknesses of the others have passed. We cannot go back to the uncivil or warring past.

The Supreme Court and the House of Representatives need end the turmoil and focus on the common good while suppressing their respective egotistical self-interests.  

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer  

In a society where poverty is acute, persistent and widespread, political parties find it difficult to amass definitive supporters. Only the elites remain “loyal” to specific candidates, and most times do so pursuing their personal and political interests. And we have seen even in recent times that some elites can be swayed when their egocentric self-interests are not satisfied to find new political homes to assure themselves greater leverage. The national interest ranks supreme.

No party should be deluded into thinking that all is done. No political party should be overconfident about winning the elections merely because of the numbers of potential voters that show up at its campaign rallies. Until the final votes are cast and the election results are announced, each candidate must create room for disappointment, which means exhausting every resource, optimizing every strategy and tactic, and most importantly, drawing the most dividend from every relationship to win the hearts and minds of the voters.

No political party has the election in its bag yet. Some parties may be better positioned than others, but they must not stop looking over their shoulders. Liberian electoral history is replete with situations where candidates were given assurances of winning the votes of specific constituencies and when the final curtains were closed, they were disappointed. Need exists for a rigorous campaign strategy that is empirically-based on an understanding of the Liberian voter. Candidates should also not forget the global tendency of how the populist wave has come to bring about huge surprises in electoral outcomes. 

The Liberian political environment is immensely polarized. Voters are generally indifferent, hard to reach a decision on who to vote for and why they should vote for that candidate. Informal polls indicate a sort of election fatigue, manifested in part by the poor enthusiasm that was evident during the voter’s registration and the formal opening of the electoral campaign. Both did not draw spectacular participation although we do not have any definitive data on these events. We also lack data to confirm or deny how people feel about the current elections.

Nonetheless, people’s feelings can be placed on a continuum. 1)  Those who are definite believers that the result of the presidential election is already decided and one particular party has it in its bag. That party awaits a coronation. They draw their cue from feeling that the opposition is yet to show that it is organized or coalesced around a cause. 2) Those who usually go far to say that the opposition is weak and will easily be defeated given that it is so dispersed.

Others believe that in this election cycle, it will be a misreading of the opposition given that partakers in the presidential elections have matured, rally monetary and other supports that have come to make them more competitive. What all these arguments boil down to is that there is likely going to be a second round. And the winning party will be the one that will begin to build allies across the opposition seeking to acquire promises or guarantees, however tepid, should they get involve in a second round.

The current election is between a ruling party that has a record and opposition parties headed by individuals who largely have little or no record of governance. The ruling party has governed for 12 years and created a “mixed” record if one uses the lens of the state of the nation that it inherited.

The opposition parties have not governed and thus not shown any capacity to take on the massive task of governing a war-ravaged, traumatized, capacity bereft, poverty-stricken society, which is still in its infancy relative to democracy. While some opposition leaders have had other roles, those cannot be compared to governing the state. The need for astute political leadership and obvious patriotic spirit cannot be overstated.

Those members of the electorate that will carry any political party to power will not be the political elites who are supporting the presidential candidates based on their vested interest, but rather the silent majority (undecided voters) who have experienced the blunt of underdevelopment and even war over Liberia’s existence.

The indifferent electorate is the one to watch and target for swaying toward one’s campaign. How each party will boost this segment of the electorate to turn out to vote will be the clinger. Messaging (clear, consistent, and persistent facts), which resonate with your targeted audience will be just as important. What differentiates a given party from the others must be clear.

The economic anxiety (fear and rage about widespread poverty and unemployment) on one side and the cultural anxiety (native power consciousness or the long-term control of power by non-indigenous elites) – not be overlooked in this electoral season. These two tendencies in the society are not beneath the candidate’s dignity to take seriously. Somewhere between these angsts, a whole host of other furies reside that have polarized the society.

They too need to be deciphered and given due attention and incorporated in their respective strategies during the ongoing campaign season. Who are the middle class, college educated Liberian voters going to vote for predominantly?

Who are the working class Liberian voters going to vote for predominantly? Who are the women voters going to choose as their candidate? Who will sway the youth vote? What will happen in the case of the ethnic-specific vote, which so many of the candidates have been courting? I call this the electorate comprehension gap, which plagues all the campaigns.

Clearly, none of the parties will be able to win these voters with a monolithic message – an appealing economic message or a cultural one that will be rooted in ethnic bigotry.

Each party will need to understand the real concerns, worries of the people relative to how the democratic landscape has changed. Why has the youth turnout within certain parties seemingly dropped? Why have women voters elected to disperse themselves across the political landscape?

It is simply not enough to conclude that you have these elections in the bag. There is no designate successor in the race. We cannot be entirely sure how these elections will turn out, but it behooves each party to become strategic, thoughtful, and search for empirical evidence to guide its campaign strategy. There are no rooms for premature mistakes in one’s campaign strategy.

Each campaign will need to find out the factors that will cause it to shed or lose support from particular segments of the electorate. Issues of trustworthiness will be raised in some quarters. Anyone who wants to win this election will have to have a targeted message, an win the hearts and minds of the Liberian electorate by campaigning hard in every village or hamlet in the 15 sub-divisions of Liberia.

But in the end, the election will be won on the basis of appealing the sensibilities of the voters that matter to them. Does religion have a strong presence in their lives? What factors and forces will endear the Liberian electorate to a particular candidate?

The “politics of the belly” and ethnic affiliation might override the other factors noted above. How will the candidate address tribal patronage, if they win? They must tell the voters.

True, the Liberian political landscape has changed, and paying special attention to those changes with the lens of a keen observer will be critical. Some have in the past come really close to winning the presidential elections and felt disappointed when the results have been announced.

A democracy is set apart from tyranny by how the people receive the final results of elections. The time has come for Liberians to show that our political system has been transformed from a one-party to a multi-party system, where political defeats will never be turned into violence.

Post-election violence should never be part of our democratic legacy. The role of the Liberian media will be critical during the campaign period. With media freedom now more pronounced than ever before, that should therefore be a catalyst for rigor in coverage. The citizenry will in the end depend on civil society organizations, like the media to enable a detached assessment of the underlying or root causes for the outcomes. 

I remain hopeful. Reckless, class, ethnic, gender, religious, and other forms of posturing, I suspect will be used by some candidates. But the fact that this country needs a process of healing the rift between the elites and the working classes or people of various ethnic backgrounds so that class or ethnic conflict no longer dictates and distorts our politics, cannot be overstated. Liberians need such a healing to begin right now.  

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer

There is a starkly ethnic nationalist rhetoric (callous and clueless) today that should frighten all well-meaning Liberians.

I am referring to the repeated tirade by those who narrow-mindedly assert that it is time for a “country man” to become the President of Liberia.

Nothing is wrong with an indigenous person aspiring for and achieving the highest office in the land.

That time is long overdue. However, when this aspiration gets framed as a form of xenophobia-inducing, exclusionary tactic, it poses extreme danger for the future of our emerging democracy which has not fully recovered from the devastation and traumas of protracted civil war.

It also negates the realities of governing a society that is becoming increasingly diverse across all socioeconomic spectrums.

We may be taking certain freedoms that we enjoy today, which were never accessible for granted.

What separates great societies from mediocre even failed societies are intolerance and hatred – denying a majority of the citizens from justice and opportunities. 

The portrait of ethnic nationalist provocateurs who preach exclusion and intolerance is offensive and unbecoming of a country that prides itself as one built on a desire for freedom and fairness.

Admittedly, the freed slaves failed to achieve this noble goal. But should that be the reason for the indigenous population to not achieve it as well?

True, the Americo-Liberian political establishment had a woeful record on inclusion.

They wrote off the mass suffering and resulting anger of the indigenous majority as mere frivolous complaint, without basis and beneath their dignity to take seriously.

That is exactly why the quest for an indigenous President should not be tinged with vengeance exclusion or xenophobia.

The casualties of ethnic polarization, the fury of the oppressed majority have trails that we all rather forget.

Instead, the burgeoning seeds of mutual accountability and acceptance which are growing organically from the soil of past brutalities should continue to be nurtured.

The fight between tribalism and tolerance in Liberia – the resulting behavioral fallout that puts Congau and Country Liberians at loggerheads should come to an end.

The tragedy of this chronic illness in Liberia’s national life is that it delivers ordinary citizens powerlessly into the hands of predators who are waiting in the wings to ride the wave of their outrage.

That rage is driven in part by the hallow-eyed slums, towns, and villages that have been gutted by unemployment, illiteracy, drunkenness, and the illicit substance epidemic, poor health, or despair deaths.

At which time in Liberian history have we seen mentally ill persons walking the streets naked in nearly every city?

To focus on the growing gloom of the acutely poor as they traditionally have been approached – those whom the elites feel they have no moral or ethical obligation to help – will certainly incense the vulnerable populations further.

It will only widen the existing class divide. It will provide justification for the alienation narrative and neglect how far we have come as a nation.

We are not there yet, but we ought to harness the burgeoning social cohesion rather than embitter the underclass.  

No well-meaning Liberian should embrace the divisive rhetoric. We must be committed to the social equality of all Liberians.

During political season, when the political elites look at the ordinary citizens, maybe they do so through anthropological lenses – seeing them as total strangers from a distant land.

There is a sort of holy kindness that the political elites offer those they perceive as politically unsophisticated during voting periods.

The elites forget that the ordinary Liberian is tired of being repeatedly used as a pawn for the personal gains of a few.

They demand dignity from the elites who look down at them through their noses. They want a pathway to peace that is durable. They do not want to go back to the “Us against Them” era anymore.

This is why all those vying for leadership and the citizens at-large must find a better way to end this nightmare.

The veiled wounds of ethnic bigotry are like a fire burn: even a mild touch can make you jump with fuming agony. Let’s not remove the scars from those wounds.

The genie cannot be put back in the bottle once you take it out.  

Liberians of all stripes have to try harder this time. We cannot keep making the same mistakes that have helped to normalize and make it acceptable for such ethnic “cluelessness or even callousness” to fester.

If a country person is going to win the presidency, let them win it on merit. Let them be the best Liberian for that position.

I am not arguing that a renewed attention should not be given to the causes of ethnic, class, and gender divides in the society, which has held it back for centuries from realizing inclusion, equality, and optimal productivity of its citizens.

I will be quite silly to think so. Politics is definitely about identity and interest and it will always be so. But we must broaden those values. Identity must be national and interest communal and not parochial.  

Some Liberians “curry a convenient deafness” when it comes to identity.

They make our multiple identities to disappear by casting all of the nation’s perennial problems in opposing ways: congau or country.

They ignore all the other sub-Liberian identities that constitute our rich diversity. By dividing the Liberian people in such a simplistic way, the lay public, ordinary Liberians, see through the mischief.

 Ordinary Liberians know that such a mischaracterization does not reflect reality. Liberia’s sparse intellectual tradition is so harmful that it leaves our national conversation deprived of substance.

Thorny issues are neglected and when poorly informed people are invited to discuss these issues, informed citizens are not also invited to counter their baseless arguments.

For this reason, the “cluelessness and/or callousness” continues to afflict our society.

The ethnic bigots then lavish attention on ethnic identity as the trump card for winning the next Presidential race. But if that happens, it will affect governance negatively.

 Will a President who wins merely because his supporters stoked ethnic fear be the President for all Liberians?

No. Would that person be the President for the multiethnic strata of the Liberian society?

No. Clearly, it is not a novel idea to say that exclusion is a recipe for hatred and protracted conflict in Liberian society.

And that should not be the place to start at so consequential a transitional point in our history. At this defining historic moment do we not want to heal rather than to reopen wounds of ethnic bigotry?

Should ethnicity remain a defining gulf in our society? Have we not made some levels of progress in peace building and reconciliation? Is it necessary to go back again before we go forward?

Congau and Country people alike should celebrate the day on which the nation will freely and fairly elect its first indigenous President.

But we should not mire that special achievement under the spell of a prejudicial undercurrent. We should not delegitimize the presidency of the first democratically elected indigenous President.

To use ethnic bigotry, a chronic condition in our national life to catapult a candidate to the presidency would be to make that person vulnerable and susceptible to unwarranted relegation and doubt that they are not deserving of the position.

Liberia is a society that sorely needs a healer who will genuinely pursue reconciliation. We will not overcome the realities of deeply entrenched patronage, corruption, inequality, brutality, and ethnic bigotry that have held this nation back by using chauvinism as the bridge to a multiethnic democracy.

We will pay a huge price if that becomes the case. We would have failed those who shed their blood for peace. We would have betrayed their trust.

Intolerance and narrow mindedness should not be our trump card. We need a sophisticated strategy for achieving this gallant goal.

The generalized cynicism among many indigenous people is understandable, but it is more important to alter the course of our hopes and history so that the ills that have caused the chronic dismay are never, never repeated.

We should not achieve this goal by stoking ethnic prejudice. An indigenous President should give all Liberians a free and full life overflowing with opportunities.

We should not plant seeds of doubts in minds of global players about the capacity of an indigenous President to govern without prejudice. It is time to give our prospective leaders reliable and sober advice.

There should be no room for ethnic identity first ideologues, who, are bent on dividing Liberians.

Any sign that a potential leader would govern out of the mainstream could jeopardize their candidacy. 

A more constructive approach to this controversy requires the abandonment of invectives, diatribes, and attacks.

This does not mean that we must also abandon criticisms of the pernicious and hideous misdeeds that were meted out at one another in the past by both people of indigenous and congau stocks. We should find a moderate position in this particular quest.

The virtue of moderation might help those of us who favor the accomplishment of this historic moment by building a broad coalition of Liberians that cut across ethnicity, class, gender, age, and location to help consolidate the instant.

When such a critical mass is assembled, we would have amassed the best fighting force to ever take on the recurrent ills that have destroyed this society.

We are on the brink of a revolution. Liberians who suffered oppression should have a greater appreciation for the oppression of others.

Or a better sense of how to include everyone into the social fabric. Past wrongs, when made right by the victims in sensitive, careful, thoughtful and inclusive manners can have enduring effects on all affected people.

The paradox that we confront today is that what we never imagined possible in the 1960s, 70s, 80s even the 90s is at the verge of occurring.

The “castoffs” have a second chance. It is time to prove that you cannot underestimate the heart of an oppressed person or group.

Country and congau people alike who have benefitted lopsidedly from “ethnic and class apartheid” in Liberia dread its end. They use the unwarranted fear of retaliatory genocide against them to make their case.

Nothing scares those people than seeing the walls of “ethnic and class apartheid” falling. Justice and reconciliation can coexist. It is not weakness to take the high road.

In 1980 and 1990, we saw what happened. The desire for change was made steep in hatred and reprisal. But if we muster a dedication to forgiveness, we will heal the gaping wounds that have troubled our country throughout its existence and shift it in gear for continuous restoration. 

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer
emmanueldolo80@yahoo.com 

As the dawn of a seismic change in our political landscape nears – ethnic bigotry, the most important and persistent social problem in Liberia, is on the rise in increasing ways. Such dark practice which lies at the root of everything wrong with the country warrants a strong rebuke.

In critiquing the structures of culture and power in Liberia, many of us have arguably failed to move into a phase, where we have transcended ethnic identity to make the political, social, and economic environments safe spaces where our rich diversity can emerge.

But if we are to reconstitute the post-war state for today’s trans-ethnic, globalized context, we have to move away from embedding our diversity with fear, hate, and uncertainty. Only then will we change the underlying structures of our democracy so that it can promote social justice and equality.

Indeed, the goal of this article is to trigger fresh thinking about how Liberians in the post-conflict context might reposition our social change project to collaboratively plan – in concert with a new strategy of diversity – a different democracy that is more inclusive.

We must be prepared for a greater interdependence inclusive of all people of Liberian descent, whether born in exile or those who have received foreign citizenship due to their protracted displacement from the homeland. 

I have read too many writings – articles and comments in recent times that intentionally or unintentionally pit one group against another – Country versus Congou; Liberians in the homeland versus Liberians in Diaspora; Liberians with foreign citizenship versus those with only Liberian citizenship.

Until Liberians can let go of this dangerous tendency to see the world in binary “us against-them” terms, the aspiration for peace, prosperity, and good governance will never be fully realized.

Yes! Our history has for too long been bugged-down in oppositional approaches to our social interactions with one another, but it has failed to reap any reconciliatory dividends.

That is why we must view those who seek to divide us along ethnic lines with grave suspicion. Historically silenced groups in the society can only magnify the fragmentation, if we keep reproducing the very “oppressor” and “oppressed” relations that we decry when we are the victims. I certainly do not mean we should not acknowledge our perennial governance challenges associated with ethnic and/or associated class divides.

Given our nation’s pervasive climate of dread and insecurity linked to ethnic prejudice and bigotry, we should do our best not to stoke the flames of ethnic and class divide any further, but seek to heal and recover. 

The incoming government should experiment with new approaches to governing across difference. Building the cross-ethnic and intercultural skills of our leaders and citizens should be a priority venture. We need to strengthen the nation’s overall sense of community while reducing ethnic tensions.

A new framework for forging interethnic harmony will have to begin with an ethnic neutral public data system. Ethnic identity should be removed from all public forms. A short story makes my point. In a recent visit to a local government facility, I was asked to complete an admission form.

On that form, there was a slot for my county of origin and/or tribe. I refused to fill out this segment. I was told that failure to complete the slot meant I could not get the public service that I wanted. Promoting the idea that each person’s receipt of public service can be linked to their ethnic identity or county of origin undercuts our egalitarian desire for inclusiveness. 

We must learn to see past the dual constructions that place groups in an “us-against-them” relation to each other. It is clear that within our educational, work, and other social settings, many Liberians share an inability to enjoy a deeper sense of human interaction across superficial differences.

For this reason, we hold on to the perverted logic that Liberians have only two choices when it comes to navigating our ethnic identity – country or congou. Those who hold this view are simply eroding the basic meaning of human identity and our mutual sense of belonging to one another as Liberians.

When we divide Liberians into these two opposite categories, we leave out a wide array of other Liberians that do not fit these categories. We make raw the lack of meaning in their lives. We disorient those Liberians born unto ethnically mixed parents, racially mixed parents, or those born of one Liberian parent and another from a foreign country. What happens to those Liberians who were born abroad and out of necessity had to acquire a foreign national identity.

Should these groups of people declare themselves as not being Liberians? In this world, a complex global space, the mechanisms defining social relations cannot be overturned without repercussions for the kind of society that we want to build.

To create a more democratic space for living, every single person who claims a Liberian identity should be given an opportunity to contribute to the collective enhancement of our communal lot. When one group strips others of the Liberian identity for selfish reasons, it negatively impacts the affected groups. 

Do we want to build a new Liberia that is unable to provide a safe place for those who do not fit the binary exclusionary categories to nurture their Liberian identity formation? By doing so, are we saying that this is a society where we cannot free either country or congou people from their respective victim statuses imposed on them by our failed historical past?

Moving beyond our past calls for a new framework where both groups plus all others who claim Liberian identity can find a sense of belonging in an increasingly diverse space and shared meaning making. Change making cannot be a zero-sum game.

For how long should we keep making our existence a tug of war, each side with an antagonist? If it remains a zero-sum game, the energy exerted by one side will result in a proportionally greater response from the other.

There will always be resistance on both sides and an intense conflict will result as it did causing protracted warfare and massive destruction and displacement of lives – a vicious cycle that led us to this point. In this oppositional dynamic, ethnic and class tensions will only become heightened, exploited by the powerful, while the powerless and vulnerable suffer.  

Certainly, latent and overt stereotypes, fear or trepidation about others, and even naked ethnic bigotry may be contributing to static levels of interaction and the slow pace at which social bonds are being forged between Liberians of different ethnic backgrounds.

There is a growing number of Liberians that did not live under the harsh periods of historic ethnic divide. We cannot keep rehashing the past in divisive ways without poisoning these young people. Discussion of the past should nurture civic identity, citizenship, and national and constitutional values and not a conflict-ridden ethnic identity.

Our country needs a radical reshaping to make it sensitive to difference in many spheres and people of diverse perspectives and ethnic identities. If there is a template for social change, which will consolidate our infant democracy and heal gaping wounds from the past, it will come from stemming the growing tide of binary partition that are reflected in the writings and utterances of some of our public officials or commentators.

Our political candidates need to be transcendental figures and speak against this growing wave of ethnically bigoted enterprise. Our democracy will be tarnished, if it is built on this form of narrow-mindedness. 

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer

I read a recent article by Mr. Ijoma Flemister on the Front Page Africa website dated April 12, 2017. It deserves critical reflection. He alleges that named US government officials, including a former president were responsible for President Tolbert’s assassination.

Mr. Flemister does not provide any evidence for his charge other than his own memory of what transpired. Does he expect for readers to take his word for it, without offering a single iota of proof to support his claims? Were other people privy to the events cited? Does Mr. Flemister have any documentary evidence for his assertions?

It might sound convenient to use foreign policy imperatives and not their domestic counterparts for prompting the coup. But balance is required in such sensitive matters. I am not a proponent of violent overthrow of any democratically constituted government.

I believe that the April 12, 1980 coup was a miscarriage of justice. President Tolbert’s assassination and the subsequent killing of officials from his government and others by the People’s Redemption Council (PRC), though prompted in part by domestic policy failures of the Tolbert government, set the stage for a series of events whose negative repercussions were not envisaged by the coup makers and their supporters. Hence, the harmful consequences continue to reverberate today.

Indeed, the causes of the 1980 coup deserve to be situated a much fuller context. It arose from so many factors. Domestic conditions impelled it alongside other variables. All such underlying factors must be brought to bear on our national conversation objectively to enable long-term solutions to our lasting governance challenges.

Mr. Flemister asked: “What was the rush?” There were domestic imperatives that propelled and/or accelerated the pace of the coup, which he ignored inadvertently or intentionally. In this article I restrict the work to the domestic issues, which I am unable to exhaust here.

These can be summed up as socioeconomic factors, the existence of undemocratic political institutions, lack of social cohesion (interethnic and class-based clashes) or the lack of cohesive national identity, and the tremendous influence that the opposition movements wielded over the military, particularly its lower brass. The latter can be explained by the subservient roles that military personnel played as domestic servants, drivers, and others for government functionaries.

One of Liberia’s perennial challenges have always been its dependence on raw materials such as iron ore, rubber, timber, diamond, and gold for export and the country’s shipping revenue as its key sources of income. Unfortunately, the prices of these products on the global market have always tended to sway the Liberian economy.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Liberian economy boomed based on the strength of iron ore and rubber sales. In 1978, iron ore constituted 55 percent of the nation’s $486 million export earnings.

As a country heavily dependent on the developed/industrialized nations, when the global economy slowed, Real GDP dropped accordingly. It is also important to note that in 1979, Liberia hosted the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Summit. It is reported that $100 million USD was spent on the OAU conference, exorbitant by any standard, and worse when the economy was declining.

In the same year, the new Foreign Ministry Office was erected. The Unity Conference Center hosted several villas, a hotel and more. The nation faced pervasive unemployment (industrial employment dropping from 71,000 to 3100) according to a commission instituted in 1978 by President Tolbert headed by Clarence Parker, who later headed the National Investment Commission (NIC).

Ordinary Liberians interpreted it as spending on luxuries while they suffered sharp ill-effects of the failing economy. They also saw it as justification for disgruntlement. Also in 1979, the government under President Tolbert was doubling its external debt at $661 million USD.[1]

Pertaining to matters of social justice, this was a nation that offered lopsided privileges to Settler Liberians who constituted 5% of the population at the disadvantage of the indigenous majority who constituted the latter 95%.

The country suffered from aging or underdeveloped roads, schools, healthcare facilities and other critical infrastructure, coupled with nearly asymmetrical illiteracy rates.

Inequalities between urban and rural residents were inaptly high. On grounds of such distributive injustice, the nation was poised for communal violence as most of the indigenous populations felt systematically excluded from opportunities for self-advancement.

It is true that President Tolbert’s integration, open door and unification policies made viable contributions to fostering social cohesion. However, he faced significant resistance from conservatives in the TWP who kept him from implementing his policies full-steam.

[2] This is how the Brownell Commission, which investigated the Rice Riots captured the causes of the national tragedy. “The Commission sees in the civil disturbance of a manifestation of serious socioeconomic and political problems with deep roots in our national society.

These problems of justice, liberty, and equality, are neither exclusively the outcome of the national policies of the incumbent administration, nor yet convincingly characterize them as conspiratorial designs externally motivated.

They are in a real sense a culmination of more than 100 years of a national leadership that appears to have eroded its constituents’ participation in a meaningful way. The surfacing of these problems which April 14 occasioned could nevertheless be viewed as a consequence of the continued decline of the quality of the social morale and principles provided for in our constitution.

Despite the fact that the constitution guarantees to all the enjoyment of fundamental human rights including the rights to a decent standard of living and in spite of the lofty, yet timely goals which this administration has set in pursuit of these constitutional guarantees, there are serious ills which plague our society…..It is our view, based on all that we have seen and heard, that it is economic disparity that are at the roots of the present tensions.

It is not “Congo” versus Aboriginal, resident versus citizens, White versus Black” It is simply that there are vast numbers of poor in our society that are finding it extremely difficult to cope. What then has been responsible for these conditions of a widening between the few highly privileged and the many desperately poor, of continuing over centralization of the decision making process, of an unreliable national security establishment all of this in spite of the pronouncement of our president.” [3] 

One can add that the riot was a conduit through which President Tolbert’s assassination passed. When the leaders of the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) and the Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA) who led the demonstration were arrested an imprisoned, it brewed fears amongst their sympathizers, principally those in the military where the activists wielded great deal of influence among the lower ranking officers, especially those that attended the Marcus Garvey High School, where the National Security Agency (NSA) staff reported to the Tolbert government that the Progressives were teaching them revolutionary and communistic tactics.

The school was later ordered closed by the Ministry of Education along with other adult night schools and told to reapply for accreditation, according to Emmanuel Bowier then Special Assistant to Dr. Hoff. They all applied and were opened, except for Marcus Garvey High School, where the military youngsters attended.

That decision, which was made by then Education Minister Hoff bred disgruntlement amongst the military personnel who were students at the school way before April 14 event. This potentially politicized the military personnel and made them sympathetic to the agitating opposition groups[4]

On the political front, when Vice President James E. Green died, President Tolbert recommended Jackson F. Doe to the TWP to succeed Green. However, the conservatives in True Whig Party who were bent on maintaining the status quo refused to accept his recommendation.

They warned Tolbert that it was too soon to integrate the indigenous population so close to the seat of power. Tolbert then got discouraged and chose Bishop Bennie D. Warner of the United Methodist Church who had no previous government experience.

[5] As the status quo prevailed, President Tolbert then settled on a candidate who was a fellow member of the cloth, a minister of the Gospel like himself – who could possibly not rock the boat since he formed part of the social elite.

President Tolbert may have failed to fully appreciate the enormous power that Jackson F. Doe would have brought to the position. While then Bishop Warner was a safe choice for the conservatives, Mr. Doe was one who could have satisfied the opposition movements’ demand for change, and bough the government a lot of time, thus perhaps delaying the inevitable until the 1983 elections.

But President Tolbert’s vacillation between the conservatives and his own ideas for change led in part to his assassination. Bishop Warner was a complex character, who did not satisfy the demand for change, hence, fostered an acceleration of the coup.

In June, 1979, the Brownell Commission which investigated the April 14 incident diagnosed the governance crisis in the country at the time succinctly: “There are, from our analysis based on suggestions from the public, a number of contributory factors, foremost among which a lag in implementation resulting from the lack of political will to execute policies and pronouncements of government.

This problem of a lag in implementation, glaring defects in the structure of implementation result, in the view of this commission from the prevailing social norms and practices which takes precedence over law and public policies and consequently renders ineffectual any meaningful change.

In such a situation, therefore, where progressive policies confront old structures and attitudes, the result can only progress circumvented.”

Also include the fact that the TWP Special Task Force appointed by President Tolbert in October 1979, led by Emmanuel Shaw, including George Boley, Emmanuel Bowier, Reginald Nance and others. In its report, the Taskforce wrote: “The TWP now find itself poised at a crossroad in its history and on the brink of a new decade.

There is much to be done if the party is to survive; we must not only stamp out the evil, we must begin to build for 1983 (next presidential elections) and beyond.

There alternatives are clear, the options well-defined, this first congress if it can find the wisdom and the courage, can catapult a revitalized TWP, confidently, into the turbulence and uncertainty of the 80s as an enlightened, united, democratic party of the people, or, if narrow-mindedness and short-sightedness prevail, the first congress might well go down in history as the party’s last.

We hope and trust that this latter course will be avoided at all cost – for the good of the party and posterity of the Republic.” [6]  This was the party’s last.

Today, after 12 years of sustained peace, the foundations of the state remain fragile even with democratic institutions emerging. Freedom of the press, individual rights against the state, separation of powers (checks and balances/rule of law), and clear division between the state and religion are still in undeveloped stages.

Ethnic antagonism caused by the dominance of the minority over the majority has since cascaded into interethnic divides. Gender inequities have also not been mitigated as yet. Transparency and integrity, which are the most important characteristics of democratic governance, have yet not been embedded in the society.

Socioeconomic inequalities are widespread. Class tensions are also seeping into most of the nation’s political narratives. The internal characteristics of the military which made the lower brass sympathetic to the progressive movements and made them part of the interest/agitating group against the elites still remain as well.

More importantly, the communal family system has been weakened by the war. Formal sector work opportunities for most citizens are limited, work and family life balance, childcare, after school programs, care for the elderly, family support services, and the enforcement of child protection services are yet to be realized nationally. The latter makes the case for a National Family Policy. 

The coup makers in 1980 repudiated the Tolbert government for “rampant corruption” as the basic rationale for their coup. They were unfaithful to the very commitments that they made to the Liberian people.

What could have happened had they utilized the analysis made by the Brownell Commission and other reports cited to build an inclusive society? Would the Liberian people had forgiven them for their lapses and let the country heal? Instead, their actions and inactions led the country directly to December 24, 1989 when the country broke into war.

They did not overcome the persistent vices in our national life – corruption, inequality, and ethnic bigotry. Instead, they magnified the exclusion and illicit acquisition of wealth. Thirty seven years later, we have yet managed to build an opportunity-based society. The place and condition of one’s birth still continues to determine one’s life outcome and the nation’s prospects remain bleak.

As I close, I should state emphatically that the underlying causes of the 1980 coup are complex. They involve both domestic and foreign policy components. We should therefore not look on one side of the equation and neglect the other.

We cannot dismiss the fact that President Tolbert pursued a foreign policy that began to lean toward the Eastern Bloc as opposed to the West.

Clearly, I am no student of foreign policy, but for the sake of balance, I need to invite a dual perspective on this matter. Perhaps those adequately trained in foreign policy will chose to address this issue from that vantage point.

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer

1] Leon Dash (March 3, 1980). Liberia Woos Foreign Investors to Promote Stability. Washington Post.

[2] Dolo, E (2006). Ethnic Tensions in Liberia’s National Identity Crisis: Problems and Possibilities. Africana Legacy Homestead Publishers. Cherry Hill, NJ. Dunn, E. & Tarr, B. (1988). Liberia: A National Polity in Transition. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press

[3] Report of the Presidential Commission on National Reconstruction (Counselor Nete Sie Brownell Commission) to Dr. William R. Tolbert – June 12, 1979

[4] Dolo, E. (2006). Ethnic Tensions in Liberia’s National Identity Crisis: Problems and Possibilities. Africana Legacy Homestead Publishers

[5] Personal Interview with Emmanuel Bowier, General Coordinator of the True Whig Party (2017).

[6] Report of the Special Taskforce on Party Reform. Submitted at the First Quadrennial Conference of the True Whig Party of Liberia, Lower Buchanan, Grand Bassa County, Republic of Liberia. October 24-26, 1979

No other time in Liberian history compares to now. Liberia is a democratic state and has been for two electoral cycles. It is about to “peacefully” transition from one president to another. This will initiate the democratic consolidation process. Some might want to equate this juncture to the 1985 elections.

An opportunity arose to set the country on a path toward democracy. It was squandered so wretchedly when the presidential election was rigged. Coups, counter coups and ultimately a protracted civil war followed. It shattered the people emotionally and plunged living conditions dangerously.

The rest is a tragic contemporary history of a nation dubbed Africa’s oldest independent state. Liberia has failed to prove how worthy it is of such a unique accolade. In 2005, the damaged and disfigured shell of the nation after war started recovery.

But it was not before its citizens went through the worse of humiliations and sufferings as displaced persons, asylum seekers, and/or refugees, essentially third rate occupants of other countries. Brain drain of unprecedented proportions resulted. Human and institutional capacities dropped sharply.

After 12 years of democratic rule and continued peace, the nation is poised to test whether or not its fragile nature can be strengthened further. Or its infant democracy will be subjected to the stranglehold that misrule and poor political decisions have had on the nation.  

Many young Liberians today exhibit consequences of the devastating conflict. Countless are functionally illiterate, pretending to be educated. High school graduates en masse fail college entrance exams.

In the workplace, some college graduates and those with Master’s degrees from Liberian institutions cannot write a fitting sentence without numerous conceptual, grammatical and spelling errors. Repeated incompetence and poor work ethic cut across variety of professions daily.

In politics, banking, law enforcement and even the public sector, the worse of these performance issues tend to recur. The depth of our national capacity crisis cannot be overstated. Left unattended, are the psychosocial effects of the conflict on intrapersonal relations. Additionally, infrastructural recovery continues gingerly.

Schools, hospitals, clinics, roads, bridges, and most of the things that constitute the fabric of the society are still rudimentary. Law and order remains basic. Some offenders are still deluded that they can beat the system even when they commit the most egregious of crimes against the state and its citizens.

The infractions that people entrusted with responsible positions create daily against others who have lesser stature and status are sometimes indescribable or beyond words.

It is time to take a meticulous stock of who we are as a people. Where do we want the country to go? Are we at the verge of self-destruction, feigning that all is well?

The untold pain that so many Liberians have endured or are undergoing suggests that we are a brutally injured and offended society. These wounds are largely self-inflicted. We need to mend, heal, reconcile, and restore relations in all spheres of our lives. 

But reconciliation cannot be used as an empty word. It must involve intentional and meaningful activities designed and implemented to ensure that disparities are diminished and polarization is prevented. Only then, will all component parts of the society become mutually supportive and reinforcing.

The resilience, which made Liberians to surmount the assault on their humanity during the war, cannot be taken for granted. People entrusted with critical national responsibilities cannot continue to violate the law with impunity and not invite the wrath of the citizenry.

It frightens me how we dare not see or feel the insurmountable and intractable weight of the growing disgust and distrust that the ordinary citizenry has toward the elites.

Maybe we in the elite have become so numb in our egotism (self-centeredness) that we remain insulated within our respective bubbles. We keep refusing to accept our flaws or anticipate its pending dire consequences. We can embellish our respective or collective achievements to bring personal and collective comforts.

But the reality is that Liberia and Liberians have not optimally utilized gifts and talents bestowed upon us. Imagine that Liberia was the first independent state on the African continent, and comparatively, its stock was matched up against or even better than many of the countries that we depend on today for support and technical assistance.

Whatever the case, the presidential election must be considered a pivotal point along our quest for recovery. No one should make any mistake reminiscent of the “most blatant vote frauds” in Liberian history, during which the National Elections Commission chaired by Emmett Harmon rigged the election in Samuel K. Doe’s favor.

The rhetoric around giving the larger portion of Liberians say in governance, which the People’s Redemption Council (PRC) espoused, translated into deception, drudgery and despotism. It became difficult to distinguish conditions before the 1980 coup and its aftermath.

By now, Liberians should know that all things within our reach are fragile and fleeting. The axis on which peace evolves is simply “Love for country.”

UNMIL’s presence while helpful in maintaining peace and stability, does not guarantee them. If Liberians put their self-interest above the national interest and seek to replicate the barbaric deeds that marked the war, UNMIL’s presence will not match their cunning intrigues.

We should never again let our beloved homeland weep uncontrollably because its dignity has been burnt by those it has given the most. Our country yearns for the patriotic spirits of all its citizens.

Yes! Tell me that I am speaking in generalities and I will be the first to admit. I have done so deliberately to invite you to do deep thinking about your individual and collective roles in the carnival of tragedies described above.

Here are some questions that may start you on the path of reflection. Do you own a fabulous real estate in another country other than Liberia? Do you get your medical treatment from abroad when illness strikes and not Liberia?

Do you have the largest portion of your wealth in foreign banks? Does your family reside in another country and you in Liberia? What have you done personally or in your current position to address the disinvestments in Liberian youth, and the slum and rural communities?

What have you done to create employment opportunities for the high number of unemployed Liberians? What have you done to improve our schools or to educate a child whose parents cannot afford to pay for one?

What have you done to draw attention to one of the greatest threat to our unity – using ethnic diatribes to divide and conquer? Have you given any thought to your role in letting the scale and scope of rape, corruption, and mediocrity take toll on our vulnerable children, brothers, sisters, and elders? The country has a permanent underclass – those who rot under the curse of acute poverty, what have you done to end their plight?

Do you exploit those with lesser resources than you for your personal gain? If you are living abroad, have you made any contributions to the nation’s development from your comfortable perch in the Diaspora?

Or do you go around nonchalantly saying “nothing will happen” as did many other Liberians living comfortably during the pre-war years who became shocked, even stunned by the sheer cruelty that Liberians meted out at one another during the warring years? Hopefully, we have learned that complacency and indifference are at the core of our condition. 

If you are intentionally or unintentionally guilty of one or more of these factors that underlie gaping inequalities in our society as I am, then we all need to take a step back and think of the good of our other countrymen and countrywomen who cannot afford the luxuries that we tend to overlook.

Instead of any form of feeling a pity for ourselves because we failed so miserably at making the best of the roost that was awarded to us, we can go back into our recesses and build and implement a robust strategy to redeem ourselves.

We can make those who are foretelling our return to war ashamed. Naysayers said the war would not end. They also said Ebola would reduce the nation to rubbles. But something inside us emerged and turned the tide of the seeming impossible. We held together as a single unit.

We did not ask people for their ethnic lineages. We crossed religious boundaries. We championed our rich diversity and came to the aid of those without the requisite resources or safety nets. If one Liberian was vulnerable, we all considered ourselves under grave threat. In doing so, we preserved peace and restored the stability of the state.

This election year is not a normal one. It is not a time to wait and see. It is a time for citizens to rise up and raise their voices, and most importantly vote their conscience. A vote this year must be for consolidating and deepening the roots of our budding democracy.

Each Liberian has a role in fighting for the future of the only country on earth that is ours. This is the time for each Liberian to resist the temptation of treating the nation’s current direction and the transition from one government to another as just one ordinary moment in history.

It is not. It is an extraordinary historical moment. If one thing stands in the way of a better future for Liberia and Liberians, it is making the most of this chance.

I am certain that history will confirm the high expectation that we hold of this inflexion point in the not too distant future. It will be recorded as the tipping point in Liberian history. Democracy in Liberia has been given a footing, although tepid.

We should not for any reason create a situation where the current political environment would be distinguished as our best. We can certainly do much better. Liberian history is replete with occasions when opportunities for change were dreadfully wasted. Let us prove the naysayers wrong this time.

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer

After 65 days into office, President Donald J. Trump, has reduced the oldest and most stable democracy in the world to an emerging one. He has made the country the butt of jokes worldwide.

Americans owe all this to the decision that was made in the voting booth. During the Presidential campaign, Trump stoked right wing populism and exploited racist, sexist, and class prejudices and fears. Now, the world is witnessing the Trump administration’s unraveling.

This unique “amateur hour” in American Presidential history is manifested by several actions. President Trump falsely accuses his immediate predecessor of wiretapping him and his campaign staffers. He then gets a stern rebuke from his own Justice Department delivered through an emissary – the FBI Director.

Standing next to other world leaders, the American President answers questions from journalists showing intellectual laziness and unpreparedness as onlookers watch in dismay. His answers are often focused on himself and far removed from the reality of the issues being discussed.

When other leaders coherently respond to questions, he is vague and elusive. He rudely drops the phone on the Australian Prime Minister. His advisors have had to custom make a new term “alternative facts” to sustain his inability to substantiate numerous claims made. He just suffered the most recent reproach, offered by his own partisans, the Freedom Caucus, which prevented his healthcare bill from passing.

Yet, he cannot stop scolding the media or the opposing Democratic Party for his own unpreparedness and unwillingness to appreciate the stature and intellectual requirements of the office that he holds.

He threatens some of the core values of America’s “greatness” a virtue he alleged was lost and his administration would restore. He came prepared to deny and dismiss President Obama’s legacy. Instead of viewing governance as a process of taking thoughtful action to solve ordinary citizens’ problems, for President Trump, it is a preoccupation with discarding his predecessor’s achievements.

With this lopsided focus, Trump’s presidency has become a repeated parade of incompetent clumsiness, shame breeding, and scandal making. President Trump’s hostility toward immigrants and his religious bigotry towards Moslems continues to undermine civil rights achievements and the nation’s social cohesion.

When Mr. Trump was campaigning, he made anti-corruption his core message, arguing that the Washington “clique” was corrupt. Therefore, he needed to “drain the swamp.”

Hopefully, by now after several missteps and subsequent humiliations, he has realized that every incoming administration needs to be strategic in how it deals with the constituents of its proverbial political swamp. In those swamps reside institutional memories. Without the cooperation of its residents – transition from one administration to the other can be mired in lapses, even blunders.  

In less than three months, the world has watched President Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn resign in sheer disgrace.

Others from his campaign team are under investigations for ties with Russia, which possibly interfered with the American democratic process. President Trump’s entire government is reeling in and out of consciousness under the spell of a possible Watergate-type scandal.

His Travel Ban Executive Order is nearly dead on arrival. His key staffers are regularly in the media contradicting one another. His own temperament has come into question repeatedly because his actions do not match the office that he holds.

Americans elected a President that has proven to be unsuited either by experience or disposition to lead them. He is therefore unleashing nothing, but confusion and embarrassment on them. Trump’s presidency has started to test the strength of American democratic institutions and it might even be buckling, although it is too early to make a full judgment.

If it happens in Liberia’s infant democracy, with underlying fragile socioeconomic institutions and social/political relationships, what would the results be? Our checks and balances as well as other safeguards against tyranny and communal violence are just beginning to be constituted.

Throughout the history of Liberia, power has been concentrated excessively within the Executive Branch, perhaps the presidency. The nation is just making strides toward overcoming this dysfunctional feature.

It can therefore not afford to elect a person whose whole purpose is to optimize his/her personal/family interest and wealth like American President Trump. 

For Liberians facing an October Presidential election, the American political comedy offers a glimpse of what can happen if the electorate elects an apprentice based on mere populist appeal or prejudicial considerations. From Liberian history, we have learned a hard lesson already: governance does not mean hosting a series of festivities.

It means achievements that can change the lives of ordinary citizens’ meaningfully over the long-run. Our country has for a protracted period been lacking in this characteristic. It is just in the infant stages of developing it after 169 years of independence. That means stakes in the forthcoming elections are extremely high.

In a society where anti-corruption and integrity issues have for long eluded its leaders and citizens, electing a new leader without the requisite sensibilities, political will, patriotism, and most importantly the experience and integrity would result in chaos.

And with the nation’s civil society just recovering from assault mounted against it by past dictatorial governments, it just might be unable to hold government functionaries accountable, if the current climate of openness were reversed.

That Liberian institutions are still weak and feeble, whomever the electorate elects as President must hold democratic values dear, and have keen understanding of pro-poor economic management.

The Liberian civil service is so thin on competence that any attempt to appoint technical neophytes to ministerial and deputy ministerial positions will further exacerbate the nation’s vulnerability. Experienced professionals will be required to manage the state apparatuses. Merit will have to be the standard at this decisive juncture. 

The current political system is not perfect. But it has managed the stockpile of deficits that were inherited appreciably. Clearly, the current President has acknowledged the administration’s weaknesses in addressing corruption and peace building.

So we need a government that will build on its accomplishments and refine those shortcomings. We do not need a new government that will be absorbed in litigating its predecessors’ failures, and thus not offering viable alternative roadmaps and solutions for addressing our acute national problems.

We need a government that will improve the standards of living of our people and provide newer opportunities for personal and collective growth and development. We need a government that will heal the fissures across political, social, religious, gender, age, and other divides.

Anyone who has worked in the Liberian bureaucracy and is keen to notice its frailties knows how steep it is in mediocrity. Bringing about durable change in the post-war government, baked in excesses is quite tasking. Efforts will be needed to replicate the successes of the outgoing government on a larger scale so that the effects can be felt nationwide. 

With weak county governments, and decentralization, the latter yet still an aspiration, the ill-effects of electing an inexperienced President will reverberate as an outbreak of a contagious disease. We live in a virtually different country from when President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf took over.

The level of political freedoms that Liberians continue to enjoy can no longer be reversed. The Johnson-Sirleaf administration has introduced institutional constraints into the Liberian political landscape that will hold any new leader’s despotic impulses in check.

The next President must show demonstrated evidence that they are able to maintain such a democratic political culture.

In the Senate and House of Representatives, we already have seen hints of what can occur when a beginner takes such important positions solely based on voter’s being swayed by money or sheer populist determinations.

Liberians will need a leader who would provide a strategy for protecting the homeland from going back into conflict, while not feeling shy to hold lawbreakers to account. Peace and justice must coexist.

Liberians should not be dangerously naïve that governance is easy because critics of the current government say so. We should not underestimate the rigors of the presidency.

This is a monumental office. This is a post that requires negotiating and navigating massive amounts of responsibilities, sensibilities and sensitivities simultaneously.

The presidency is vital to determining the future direction of our country and the humanity of its citizens.

The infighting that has engulfed various political leaders needs a steady hand to manage. Equally so, our Presidential candidates must raise the bar of our national conversation.

By now, our national conversation should be addressing the chain causes and effects of our most intractable societal problems: economic scarcity, high/widespread unemployment, persistent and protracted inequalities, poor education systems, rudimentary healthcare delivery systems, underdeveloped infrastructure, etc.

Those who want to lead the nation must present a blueprint for building a durable blue collar middle class. They must resist any temptation to be nasty or launch vicious personal attacks towards one another.

Instead, they must offer coherent and consistent ideas that will boost investment in human resources development so that they can diagnose, analyze, and solve our complex national problems.

Even more critically, what is the plan for harnessing the dividends of brain gain from the displacement of Liberians all over the world?

It is only by husbanding the nation’s cohesiveness, that it would be competitive into the future. And in the end, divert us from the shocking path that Americans have chosen for themselves. 

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer

Another agent of the war criminal Charles G. Taylor has allegedly spewed the sharp-cutting rhetoric that must never again be a part of our national dialogue. Reportedly, Cyril Allen, Sr told the media that he sees “nothing wrong with resuscitating the Taylor regime.”

The sentimental longing for the return of despotic rule in any form is simply reckless to say the least. If the statements attributed to Mr. Allen are true, it is critical that all sensible Liberians call his bluff. CDC and its coalition too must also speak against this decadent desire. If CDC is an extension of the Charles Taylor regime, its coalition led by Senators George Oppong Weah and Jewel Howard-Taylor is dead on arrival.

The time when some or many Liberians were enthralled with predators like Charles Taylor is now in the dustbin of history. Anyone who intends to recreate this degenerate period must recognize that Liberians know the value of democracy and the vices of dictatorship.

While Liberia today has an infant democracy and fragile peace, there is no comparison with its tyrannical past. Fresh in the memories of Liberians are the cruelty and carnage that typified the Charles Taylor era. The mass suffering of Liberians that characterized the Taylor government cannot and will not be brought back. It must remain fantasy in the heads of the likes of Mr. Allen and others who wish for such a gruesome past to be revisited upon us.

If Senators Weah and Howard-Taylor are not able to denounce this statement, they are certainly embracing it by their silence. And if they are truly agents of the Charles Taylor regime as some have alleged, then the blood of those who that government spilled are on their hands. The repressive nature of that establishment cannot be treated indifferently. Charles Taylor’s government was a terroristic regime.

The dream of a new Liberia, which Charles Taylor and his associates promised became a frightening nightmare that Liberians are recovering from gradually. It must never come back. We should not be lured into believing that anything good can come from such a period or anything suggestive. We know how Charles Taylor and his henchmen gained their grip on power through coercion, violence, and mass slaughter.

Who wants the military to become a political actor in our democracy? Who wants the proliferation of drug-addicted child soldiers plying the streets with arms and ammunitions? Who wants ethnic identity rather than national identity being the defining characteristic again?

Who wants tensions along religious line being brought to the fore again? The depressing legacies of this dictatorial past remains present with us today and are felt by the many young people who were recruited by warlords to fight alongside them. I know for real what it takes to be drug addicted after being a child combatant. I have in recent times been speaking to some of these young people. They too do not want to re-live that moment when they were first exposed to these appalling activities.

The period that military excesses were enacted against civilians with impunity cannot be brought back. Interethnic strains, interfaith tensions, class rigidities, and their associated political manifestations were all the hallmarks of the Taylor government. This was a bankrupt society along all lines. Mr. Allen’s standard of judgment is therefore skewed because he was a direct beneficiary of that spoiled system. There is something dramatically wrong with the second coming of a Taylor government. Liberians want to forge ahead, rebuilding the social fabric that Taylor and the likes of Mr. Allen destroyed.  

Lots of young people today were fortunate that they did not live under the Charles Taylor regime. But these rants by Mr. Allen and other Charles Taylor’s lackeys must be taken seriously. For these young people’s sake and the future of Liberia, Allen and others must be rebutted fervidly. Vivid accounts of some of the depraved and ridiculous atrocities that Taylor and his followers committed in Liberia must be rehashed to counter any illusions that this evil of a man and his supporters mean well for Liberia.

Charles Taylor, a man who was convicted of “killing, raping, and cutting the limbs of civilians” cannot be thought of fondly by any group of people. Such “despotic nostalgia” can only be considered a psychological disorder given that it is intended to unleash an unwarranted traumatic flashback on his victims.

Counselor Tiawan Gongole and many other human rights advocates of that period are alive today who were arrested, detained, imprisoned, tortured, and some even killed by Taylor’s loyalists. The Dokie family still lives with the grisly, agonizing and senseless assassination of their relatives while on their way home to attend a celebratory event. The myriad of girls and women who were raped by Taylor and his armed gangs do not relish his government’s reincarnation. Charles Taylor conscripted untold numbers of minors into his warring faction and employed coercive powers without restraint. He set nation’s socioeconomic development back for decades.

Indeed, we should be outraged when talk of reviving his regime is expressed. We should not shrink back under the pretext of not wanting to give credence to the likes of Cyril Allen, Sr. His views should not be normalized in our national debate but rebutted forcefully.

It is therefore my ardent hope that many people in the Coalition, especially its leaders, do not hold what should be a minority view in the body politic. Cyril Allen, Sr. is a direct beneficiary of the mayhem and gaping wounds that Charles G. Taylor caused for which this war criminal is spending the rest of his life in prison.

Emmanuel Dolo, Ph. D., Contributing Writer