What is politics anyway?

In our glorious nation politics is merely a game, a means of forwarding ourselves before others. There is no ideology behind anything, but pure powerstruggle. This is what doomed this country for the past fourteen years. And even before that. I mean seriously, we have more lawyers here than we have doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and all other providing professions put together. Among all the nations of the world, I cannot name any other that does not have a productive middleclass.

This fact shames me, but that is what it is, a fact. We have become so used to other people coming here to set up factories and other production facilities to give us employment. Ever since the first settlers put their feet on these shores, we started depending on regular shipments from six thousand miles away. This dependency has spread to our whole society. Even today we still look to our government to bail us out of this mess. Even back then no one wanted to produce anything, but everyone wanted to become a trader.

The result was clearly shown in the past election, where we had (imagine this) 22 diferent presidential candidates from 22 differerent political groupings. I have not even bothered to check how many of these contenders were lawyers, but I can assure you that they were in majority. Our mentality has provided us with educated people who grow one ambition in their lives, to one day work for the government, legislature or the judiciary. Amongst these 22 different groupings, I have still not seen any real ideology presented. Why? Because our different parties were formed because of prominent people and who they knew, who they were related to and to how much money they could raise for their campaigns.

There has never been any political agenda here other than to try to get for oneself whatever possible.

Our present government has laid forward its proposed budget for just over 180 million dollars. I still have not seen one alternative budget proposal from our numerous opposition parties. Nothing. Suggestions like we should spend more on this or that. This is our view. NOTHING!

But we can sit down and complain. Let us be straight. Our people are suffering, but beware that there are limited resources that have to be distributed. It will never be the task of the government to feed us, give us jobs and all the rest. That part is up to us, us alone. We live in a very fertile country, but we cannot feed ourselves. In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.

Roll up your sleeves and get to work.

I break my silence

Up till now, I have been quite content with the various developments in our country. When I am pleased, there is not so much to write about. Right now that is changing so fast that you can be sure to be hearing from me a lot over the next few weeks. Our "honourable" legislature is at this moment trying to change their own rules of engagement. It is just as bad as when their predecessors passed laws that entitled them to public property at the end of the transitional period.

When the race for office was on, when money and rice was used to buy votes in the various constituancies, all those that allowed their votes to be bought should be turning in their beds. These same men and women that they voted into lawmaking power are now showing their true colours. Let us not forget that not all of them are involved, but there is a worrying amount of these "honourables" that do not want their affairs to be subject to public scrutiny. The media reports of 600 cooks and 43 drivers in the employ of the legislature. Does not the Liberian general public deserve the right to transperency even here? They want to audit themselves? What an outrage. Here we as a nation are trying to crawl back onto our feet, and we have a bunch of scoundrels that want to place themselves above the law. One law that should be passed is the shortening of their tenure to four years. I can go on and on but I think you get the general picture. Especially, what message does this send to potential investors.