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.