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!