By: Togba-Nah Tipoteh
We are hereby created by Our Creator to serve and not to be served. We are called to be selfless rather than selfish. Some of us are money-driven and live to be served rather than serve. When we live to be served, only a few persons are rich and get richer, while the rest of the people remain poor and get poorer. This is the situation in Liberia. This Commentary helps us to know how to become selfless.
The situation in Liberia is bad because selfish persons dominate it. Due to this selfish posture, the Liberian economy is poverty-generating rather than poverty-alleviating. National Legislators have access to at least LD200,000 a day, and their foreign business partners have access to at least LD300,000 000 a day, while nearly all of the people of Liberia have access to at most less than LD300 a day(The Annual Reports of CBL, LISGIS, MFDP, MCI, WB, IMF, ADB, and UNDP. This situation is bad, and the people of Liberia have declared that Liberia is headed in the wrong direction (Afrobarometer, 2022).
The wrong direction is seen in the colonial economic direction of the production of raw materials for export without any prioritization of Value Addition. Liberia can be put in the right direction through the addition of Value Addition that gives ownership to Liberians rather than foreigners to engage in local manufacturing with the Liberian-oriented education and training of Liberian youth who get employed, leading to income generation and poverty alleviation. With the increase in local production, local prices go down, and local incomes go up, leading to the reduction in imported productions and the purchasing of local products. There is economic growth with economic development, the sustained improvement in the living conditions of the people.
We have looked at bad situations. Now let us get some good news. Let us look at the movements in the 52nd, 53rd, and 54th National Legislatures of Liberia, and we find out that almost all of the Legislators who wanted to be re-elected were not re-elected in the October 10, 2023 election. This trend will continue in the forthcoming elections. They were not re-elected because of the awareness raising being done by people who love Liberia. This awareness-raising convinced voters that the persons placed in the Legislature were bad people, so the voters did not vote for them to be returned, and they were not returned to the Legislature.
This awareness raising also informed people about the corrupt nature of Liberia’s National Elections Commission (NEC), the supervisory body for elections. This is why the NEC’s cheating was reduced considerably in the October 10, 2023 election. The big news is that on October 10, 2023, a world record was set with 76.86% of the voting-age population voting. This is the same NEC that published the existence of 15,000 voters but later indicated the figure of 243 000 voters in the 1927 Election, thereby entering Liberia into the Guinness Book of Records as having the world’s most fraudulent election. This change in the mode of the October 10, 2023, NEC is due to the telling of the Truth in the awareness raising that continues as this Commentary is written. Therefore, the only way to get persons with good records elected is to engage in awareness raising in ways through the Rule of Law to motivate people to take action to transform the bad and unfair prevailing electoral system into a good and fair enduring electoral system to elect persons with good records to bring in the system of Justice, the indispensable ingredient of Peace and Progress for Liberia and any other country.
