By Othello B. Garblah
Unfolding events at the House of Representatives, coupled with the early Wednesday morning arson attack on the Capitol Building, the seat of the National Legislature, reflects the choices Liberians have made over the years during elections.
A country that puts popularity over competence usually winds up electing to power hoodlums – troublemakers and hooligans who have not matured or do not have the requisite understanding of what it means to be a statesman or even be called an honorable.
These men and women, most uncouth, emerging right from the kitchen tables, plank fields, market stalls, office doors of others, etc., were fortunate to be elected on either party lines or sympathy rather than by competence; thereby, lacking the understanding or do not know the magnitude of the job before them.
As such, the only way they know how to resolve conflict is through the ways they know best through acts of hooliganism or gangsterism- yet they take home a chunk of the country’s meager national budget as salaries and allowances. They entered politics with their eyes set on money, not the provision of the kind of leadership the country yearns for.
But what else can we expect from these men and women who now see politics as the easy path to wealth.
Liberia’s National Legislature, particularly the House of Representatives, is a compendium of mostly illiterate individuals who rose from being “House boys and Yana boys and girls” to state power.
But again, we, the Liberian electorates, are the guilty parties here. And to quote Amb. Nathaniel Barnes, Liberia’s former Ambassador to the UN, said, “A country gets the type of leadership it deserves.”
When people vote based on sentiments and lack of understanding of the issues at heart, resounding results would most likely lead the country to retrogression-trust me.
Why has President Boakai failed to exercise leadership thus far?
The decision by President Joseph Boakai to take a side in the ongoing leadership crisis at the House of Representatives, a crisis which has recorded a sequence of events before the Capitol Building was inflamed early Wednesday morning, shows a lack of leadership.
As an elderly statesman with over 40 years of experience in government, President Boakai is in a position to understand this country’s most recent history and why such political tensions are unnecessary for his administration.
A country lagging in almost everything, from infrastructure to human capacity, needs not to engage in self-destruction as Liberians are witnessing today.
Again, as an elderly statesman, the power to unite both parties within the ongoing Speakership crisis at the House of Representatives is in his hands. He could have intervened and settled the matter. If he is bent on having Koon as Speaker, as it is evident, he could have encouraged the majority bloc to give the embattled speaker his due process and removed him by the law.
To bypass such process and publicly display his choice for Koon’s leadership despite the Supreme Court’s ruling to revert to the status quo also demonstrates a failure in leadership at the highest level of the country’s leadership.
Politics aside, Liberia deserves better and until the electorates revert from choosing popularity over competence-Liberia’s future would remain bleak.
