Those damned lists

Ever since the coup in 1980, as soon as trouble breaks out in our country, lists surface from nowhere. Lists of peoples names that were involved, that should be arrested.

This fenomenom allowed people to get their enemies, rivals, creditors names on a list of people that were allegedly involved in whatever was the uprising, and be subsequently arrested for whatever.

Our National Security Agency has allegedly compiled such a list again. Don´t they know that those days are over, when security personel took state matters into their own hands.

They treason trial going on right now is getteing more and more embarassing for every day that goes. Doesn´t anyone see that?

Depreciation

Since our honourable assembley is in recess, I have had very few reasons to become angry recently. So instead of venting anger, maybe I can be a bit more constructive in my thoughts than usual.

As with anything in life, you have to sacrifice something in order to gain something else. It is one of the basic laws of economics. It is just that we as Liberians have to learn to abide by this.

Normally, in Liberia, when a building is erected, it usually stands as erected for the rest of its life. For some reason, we tend not to spend a cent on maintainence because we feel that we are smart and can therefore "save" or not waste funds. In reality, every penny not spent on maintainence is depreciation. Do we care? Apparently not. This worried me in the eighties when the Samuel Kanyon Doe stadium was built. The first thing that hit me that day I visited was "How long will these toilets flush?" I was just a boy, but for some reason I was wondering what kind of a maintainence budget the place had. But that is just me.

Today with the stadium renovated to brand new, I cannot help but wonder again. This is just one case. Now with major road projects initiated, I still wonder if anyone ever thought about budgeting funds for future maintainence of these. And if they have thought about it, will the funds really go towards their intended purpose.

I just have to say bridges, harbours, sewage systems, government buildings whatever. Sure, they will be rebuilt to standard. But what happens after that?

Can we change the way we have done things in the past?

The cost of living gets so high...

... the rich and poor, they start to cry. This lyric from Bob Marleys "Them belly full" is a reality in Liberia.

In the old days, commodity prices were some how controlled by the government. How this worked I am not sure and I am not sure that I want to know. Today, everywhere you turn, someone is whining about the price of something and turning all blame for this, incorrectly, mind you on our government.

At the same time there are mixed signals coming from the Ministry of Commerce on this issue. There are some kind of regulations as to what a bag of butter rice should cost, what a bag of cement should cost, what a gallon of gas should cost. I am not going to take too much notice of this but let it rest at that.

What I do want to bring up is the fact that we in Liberia are entirely dependent on importing our most common commodities. This makes us incredibly dependent on the market prices of these commodities. Rice, gas, cement, cooking oil, fuel oil, beef and so on. Fellow Liberians, please note that the price of crude oil is nearing the 100 dollar mark per barrel. This has a huge impact on the whole of our society, locally and abroad. As everyone may have noticed, taxi fares have gone up. This is only one effect. The cost of generating electricity has also gone up, so that those in businesses that consume electricity have to adjust their prices for this increase - cold drinks, ice. As mentioned earlier, transportation costs have increased for those importing goods as well as farmers transporting produce from rural areas. In the end the price of most goods will have to be adjusted for this.

Worldwide, the price of grains (rice,wheat,corn) have increased with 25 to 30 percent. This will be noticed in the price of say flour, cornmeal, animal feed. And that is just how it is. Our government is powerless to do anything about this. Please realize this and save your breath for something more useful.

I am not even sure that if oil is found and produced off our shores that this will even effect the local price of gas in the short term.

I cannot say it enough, but we have to start breaking our dependency on imports from abroad and growing our own staples. But I almost forgot, no one wants to be a farmer nowadays. Everyone wants to wear a three piece suit and drive a SUV.

If you have ever flown abroad, you might have noticed that the more developed the country that you are flying over, the more you will find that every available space on the ground to be utilized for some sort of farming. Flying over our own country reveals that most of it is bush, and shows how far we have to go.

Tip: Go to your local market/supermarket, and see what is available and what is not. Choose a product that you think you could produce and do some research. Find out the price of it, how it is made, how it is packaged, who else would need it. When this basic research is done, you would have enough info to start testing on your own. Start finding out about which raw materials are needed, where to get these. From there you start find out what the raw materials cost, who sells them, what tools or machinery would be needed. Before you know it, you will have enough to make a basic business plan and a budget. If you cannot find the raw materials, hey, there is another business plan for your neighbor, your brother/sister/children/community.

Start with your own two hands and start producing whatever it is that you fell for in the first place. As you perfect your product, it will start to sell and generate income. Gradually, you will be able to get better tools or that machine that you once dreamt of. Eventually you will need help to produce at a quicker pace, wham you have employees/partners. Believe me, what seemed impossible at the start will change your life, and the best part is that anyone can do it. That is how it was done in the "developed" world and it should be easier, because nine times out of ten, some one has already done it.

Developement by production

Since the early days of settlement on these shores, the early settlers met an agrarian society with whom they started trading. During the first few years of the colony, almost everyone started trading goods in one way or the other.

Our problem today is that this mentality still persists. Everyone you meet wants to start a business. If you inquire enough, you will learn that their idea of a business is buying wholesale and selling retail. There is nothing wrong with this in particular, but on the whole, it creates a society full of traders basically adding value on already existing products.

In the long run, what we need are more producers, people producing goods with local produce and raw materials. In todays society, the real money is made by anybody importing goods into the country, and we know exactly who that is.

So, in order to start increasing our GNP, start producing something from scratch instead of trading. In time your product, if it meets up to standard will help to fill some of the voids today filled by imported goods.

Back to the dark ages

Here we go again.

Imagine the chief justice of Liberia summoning the editors of all the newspapers in the nation to humiliate and threaten them with 30 days jail, if when they refer to him do not do it in a special way according to his instructions. Who does Mr. Johnny Louise think that he is? God?

This is bad enough in this day and age, and what scares me even more is the fact that the same man summoned the editor of the Daily Observer Newspaper to question him on a cartoon that the paper carried on the subject.

It can also be noted that these incidents always take place when the president is out of the country.

Eh my people

Here we go again. The other day, our honorable legislators received a request from the Ministry of Finance to produce receipts and invoices for funds made available to them. The letter comes from the Debt Management and Expenditure division of the ministry and seems to be a routine letter requesting routine things.

What does our honorable assembly do? In this day and age, they are upset because the writer of the letter is a deputy minister. How dare he, who is only a deputy minister, write to us and request invoices from us. "Does he not know who we are?" is written in the undertone of the issue. "We are untouchable and under no one."

Please. The man is doing his job. If you have spent the money without the receipts to show for it, then say so. Do not go about beating your chests like some big gorilla in order to scare him. The only thing that the reaction creates is distrust. Show the receipts!

It does not get any better when you also hear that the supplier of fuel to the assembly has not been paid for 3 months. Of course they will not supply anymore until they get paid.

Law business

I do not know how come we Liberians love "law business". Everywhere you turn, someone is a lawyer. I guess something went wrong back in the day (in the 50s, 60s and 70s). For some reason almost everyone seemed to have gone to school somewhere and studied the law, or if not that, political science, philosophy or some other useless profession for the future of a developing country. What happened to the entrepreneurs, the doctors, the engineers, the industrialists, the scientists.....the list just goes on.
What has a lawyer ever produced that has contributed to the development of our nation? A bunch of words. People cannot eat words. You cannot sell words. Just look at our society today. Everywhere you turn, someone is arguing about something. Everyone is politicizing everything. People can sit and invent hidden agendas in just about everything. Just look at the grumble about a "passport" in the media. It makes you sick.

Now that I have gotten that out of my system, let me clarify myself. If you are going to study the law, fine. I will not hold it against you, but please when you get your degree, seek a job in the judiciary or in any related business. Start your own law firm even.

Whopee, got you sweet!

I could not stop laughing the other day, it was just so typical of our nation, that I had to write this piece.

Our auditor-in-chief, who is going to be responsible for performing audits on all government entities in the future recently dismissed his entire staff of auditors in order to reformat the competence level at the commission. Right away, dismissed workers cried foul and ran to their buddies in congress, who in turn, issued an order to the said commission to reinstate these souls. They also summoned the a-i-c to"give reason why he should not be held in contempt".

Can you imagine this? Our lawmakers interfering in the business of a governmental agency.

It got even better when said auditor informed said congress that he was carrying out the work that they had approved about 3 million to in the budget that they had recently passed. He even pointed out that if said lawmakers had bothered to read what they had approved, the whole situation would not have arisen.

In the cause of the people, corruption will diminish. Just wait.

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.

Here we go again

I thought that the days of closing newspapers went out the window with the rest of the sewage. But somehow, someone has decided to go back to the old ways and "close down" critical media institutions. Up till now it seems that the action is in the hands of the police. When will these fools learn that this is the wrong way of doing things. There is also a right way. If you do not like something that I have said or written, first of all you inform me. If there is no way to reconcile on the issue, you take your complaint to the courts and we meet there and contest the freedom of speech and opinion. If I have done anything wrong, I am punished. You do not go running and calling someone you know in the police to come arrest me and all the rest. But have a hard head and continue with this childish attitude, journalists have the sympathy of their fellow journalists. The repercussions of these kind of things have a strange ability to find themselves reiterated very easily in the foreign press and suddenly all of a sudden, our supposed donors get to hear of them. And these people start to take notice and think; but was not Mrs. Johnson here the other day telling us of the amazing progress that was being made in Liberia asking us to help. Then they might wonder and say but let us maybe wait and see, and not go rushing into things. I do not even have to bring up the foreign investors into the equation. When you praise a white chicken the next thing you know, it will just turn around and roll itself in its own shit, and not be as white and clean as before.

Storm in a glass

Damn, we like politics business oh! What! It has been over a month now that, and all over our various media institutions, and our honourable lawmakers at the various conference centers in the northern suburbs of Monrovia and elsewhere, are still voicing their different opinions of whether or not this person violated the constitution. Blah, blah, blah. According to X.x article of the constitution, this and this. According to the Supreme Court ruling, this and that. And we shouldn´t even mention everytime the Liberian Petroleum Refining Cooperation releases a finacial statement. Ooohh! You just see them creeping out of the woodworks, every last Tom, Dick and Harry voicing their "expertise" on what is wrong and right about this and that, and still getting the facts wrong. Don´t get me wrong, freedom of speech is one of the things I will defend to the end. What I am trying to say is that we need to build up our country and create jobs very urgently, but it seems that most of us are sitting around debating petitesses with such enormous energy. Egos are flying all over the place, our so-called legislators all want to demonstrate their newfound power. A lot of these voices being thrown into these debates are from abroad. Come home, do not just sit there. If you are all that, you should be here, helping. You who knows accounting, come home and demonstrate. You who know law, I am sure that the judicial could use your help. And it just goes on. But no one is interested, everyone wants a government job and as long as they are not given one, our businesses will remain run by foreigners. This reminds me of when in the founding of our nation, land was being handed out to each family that arrived. But still, almost four or five years after the beginning of the settlement, not enough food was being produced because no one wanted to farm. Everybody wanted to trade. It got to a point where some lazy asses just sat and waited for the next boat to come in with supplies. Please funnel your energy into something productive instead of wasting it on nonsense.

Unwillingness to help

Now this is exactly what I was talking about in my last post. The Millennium Challenge Corporation has for months been trying to get basic information for the evaluation of Liberias chances of qualifying for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation from the various ministries involved. The figures availiable date from the days of the Transitional government. But of course, I am sure that the usual "whats in it for me attitude" in the same ministries has put an effective stop to any information gathering, which by the way is one of their primary functions. Once again, the Liberian people suffer at the hans of uninterested government employees. I will therefore repeat my call for the immediate flushing of all ministries up to the ministerial level as was done in the Finance Ministry. Go Ellen. Go get them.

Who blames the World Bank?

In these days of Davos, our people are wondering what the World Bank is doing for Liberia. I for one know what the World Bank wants to do for Liberia and these wishes have been expressed to the public. That is one thing. It is a totally different issue of implementing these different projects. Just imagine, a group of World Bank officials want to build a road, a market or whatever for us. In any other country, you would contact the appropriate ministry, set up a project group and go from there. Who does what. Budget. Implementation.

However, in our beautiful sweet land of liberty, when these proffessionals meet our middle level ministry officials who are only interested in how many bags of cement are needed so that they can go and collaborate with the Lebanese for them to get their share of exaggerated amounts of cement. These World Bank officials are tired of meeting our officials whose only interest is what they can get for themselves. Just imagine, you are sitting in a meeting with someone that you are trying to help. This same person, who is supposed to work for the improvement of Liberia and is on a government payroll for this exact purpose wants you to pay him to execute his part of any project. I do not blame the World Bank or any of the international donors for not wanting to just hand over large sums of cash to be misappropriated.

Until there is a genuine interest for those sitting in these desirable civilservant positions to work for the improvement of Liberia for all Liberians, then progress will be extremely slow. One way of remedying this is to repeat the example of the flushing out of the Finance ministry last year. There is too much old blood within the ministries. Start one ministry at a time, and sack the whole lot and find people who are interested and qualified to work at these ministries. For goodness sake!

Everything charkla oh

I can just sit and watch, and laugh at our "honorable" lawmakers. There are so many sayings that come to mind: he who plants it will reap it, as you make your bed so will you sleep and so on.

You may wonder why I am laughing, giggling so hard that tears are running down my face against my will. I am nearly weting my pants because the whole situation in our lawmaking forum is just hilarious. It reminds me so much of when I went to kindergarten ages ago.

Instead of sitting down and revising and proposing well needed laws, our "big men" go about playing politics among themselves.

This is my own theory of what has happened:

Manager and board of LPRC see to it to fill their own campaign coffers with the company´s money and therefore are able to "pay" for their seats in parliament. Certain people make themselves unpopular amonst their collegues, even embarrasing them most of the time. Certain people start dishing out moneys for votes to become the top man which of course happens. When push starts coming to shove, former paid backers conpire and certain checks are made public with a certain audit conducted by independent auditors. A certain "get our money back" task force starts investigating and all of a sudden, certain lawmakers start claiming to have received bribes. A certain lawmaker just happens to have recordings of other lawmakers accepting these bribes. This same certain lawmaker starts publicly pointing the finger at a certain other branch of government, crying foul.

If you ask me, someone fooled this certain lawmaker after watching a b-police film, to personally finance said bribes and make recordings as a last resort effort to stop any votes of non-confidence by trying to force an investigation into the matter of these self-induced bribes.

We are sitting on the edge of our seats, awaiting the next episode.

The moral of the story is, money spent should always have some backup, because when the receiver spends it, he forgets where it came from.