Deconstructing Liberia
by Tarty Teh
The Analyst (Monrovia)
ANALYSIS
Friday, January 26, 2007
They began crating Liberia away and shipping it home to Nigeria, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and even as far away as Burkina Faso in the early 1990s. The ECOMOG did. They were the Economic Community Monitoring Group, an offshoot of the larger Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). But even as they sent home any part of Liberia they could detach, they still had the potential for being saviors for the lives that could be spared by their very presence.
Liberia was at war with itself. It was risky to be here. But a crack team representing ECOWAS’ first attempt in peacekeeping was here. As one European writer said about American soldiers in Europe during World War II, “They are overpaid, oversexed, overfed, and (thank God!) they are over here.” So the ECOMOG were here – oversold, overwhelmed, overbearing, and (for goodness’ sake) over here. So, after hauling major appliances looted from Liberian households and businesses, they began to dismantle Liberia’s infrastructure piece by piece: the power plants and transmission wires, then the wooden posts and aluminum pylons that carried the power lines, all sent home.
When rebel leader Charles Taylor took over the Bong Mines concession area, he arranged to have the company’s huge power plant shipped to Burkina Faso after trained Burkinabes skillfully took it apart. Taylor got arms transshipped through Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast in contravention of the U.N. arms embargo as a reward. Guineans streamed across the border to pick up what was left of LAMCO. They had their own soldiers as peacekeepers in Liberia to protect the convoys headed home with things lifted out of Liberia.
But, somehow, the ECOMOG gang also managed to hold the fortress until the rest of the international community arrived and restored some semblance of order. The hastily assembled ECOMOG peace brigades lost lives and limbs due as much to their own greed and ineptitude as to the viciousness of the warring factions they tried to keep apart. It is because of ECOMOG’s efforts – faults and all – that we had some elected governments and some form of peace. But why is Liberian still being taken apart for shipment abroad three years after the war’s end?
We are about to investigate how ready-to-order, palletized iron ore at the Port of Buchanan was disposed of during the interim administration of Mr. Charles Gyude Bryant against a Liberian Supreme Court injunction. And why shouldn’t we? Yet the cast-iron manhole covers are lifted every day for sale to scrap dealers who are apparently doing a legal and lucrative business of buying and shipping what was left of Liberia after the war.
There is a Nigeria ship, in the Port of Monrovia, that used to carry scrap iron goods. It’s called Pots Express. It’s here because there are pieces of Liberia to be taken away. The one-foot diameter PVC pipes that run the length of the road from the U.N. Drive to the Bong Mine Pier is stripped of every nut and bolt that once reinforced the joints of the conduit that carried fuel to the oil terminals. Every detachable item made of iron, copper, or aluminum is potentially on its way someplace else within the West African economic zone. But while the transactions build up the rest of ECOWAS, they continue to tear down Liberia.
Talk about market forces at work! But if there are no referees for any tournament, then it is a game that only the crooks can win. I know there may be some legal and political implications, but can’t we just put up a sign that says, for instance, “Liberia needs every scrap; we have none to spare”? After that, the government can place a ban on the sale and importation of scraps from Liberia. I think the people who come from Guinea and Nigeria to buy these stolen items will understand – if we are so worried about hurting their feelings.
I know that there are things we cannot expect the government to do overnight; but I think this administration can make the problem of selling Liberia to junk dealers an agenda item for one of its cabinet meetings. And when the meeting is over, let Information Minister Laurence Bropleh do his thing. Until then, there will be no point in replacing the stolen manhole covers, knowing very well that they will soon afterward be on their way to Guinea and Nigeria as raw materials for the growth needs of those countries.
While we await some resolution, we must dodge the holes created by absent manhole covers as we walk and drive around the capital. Merely walking or driving in the streets of Monrovia involves incalculable risks. What will it take to end the looting – a presidential proclamation or one more parade around the city (a la Providence Island restoration campaign) to remind the government of the lack of public order in the oldest republic in Africa?
The Unsettled Settlers
Maybe people who are used to being on the top don’t have the kind of sensibility that would otherwise give pause to an ordinary person very much in tune with his society. The people who are pushing for the restoration of the Providence Island (for whatever it was worth before the war) must fall in the category of those who could care less what the rest of Liberia thought. Working the system to one’s advantage is a protected right. But the government has the obligation to protect the larger society from political and social predators before any disadvantaged group feels a need for destructive counteraction as a natural, but extrajudicial, course correction. These unscripted adjustments sometimes take the form of war and other upheavals that retard political and social progress.
Any Liberian who can read a line of this article was alive when the Liberian civil war ended in 2003, and was affected by it to some extent. We all should therefore be on our best behavior with respect to the rights of others barely three and a half years after the war. In Liberia, counteraction to repressive governance was delayed for more than a century. And when it finally came, both the predators and the preyed-upon were surprised by the scope of the resulting destruction. The trigger-points of individuals may spark debates here and there; but mob reaction often comes through sudden group awareness of injustice. But we want to be able to contain any action necessitated by group awareness within the bound of social and political order.
I've never thought about the Providence Island in any regard that could remotely be associated with any prejudice. But the subject was thrust upon me recently with such force that I quickly reached my boiling point. Even when I heard a sponsor of the restoration of the Providence Island on the radio, I was not alarmed because I had no desire to take on the group on its first outing. But when on December 20, 2006, I realized that I was stuck in traffic approaching the Monrovia City Hall because pro-restoration marchers had commandeered the road to downtown Monrovia, I realized that there was a scheme. And sure enough, the young demonstrators sported T-shirts with the inscription, “Restore Providence Island Now.” I know there are children who, between ages eight and 15, are astute enough to have an opinion and strong enough conviction about historical artifacts; but I doubt that there are enough of them to cause a traffic jam in the streets of Monrovia.
I therefore don’t believe that there are that many children who care about politics in general or the Providence Island in particular, even if they are of the Americo-Liberian stock. There must therefore be a self-centered agenda somewhere. And if we don’t challenge the orchestration of selfish causes, we will find ourselves again playing catch-up to schemers. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there are people who care this much about the heritage of the tiny group of people who settled Liberia roughly 160 years ago. My question is this: What right do they have to force their priorities on the national agenda at a time when hundreds of thousands of Liberians remain displaced three years after the end of the war that was started due to some settlers’ lack of patience for an evolving political process?
I say this because when I was 14 in the early 1960s, I never volunteered to leave school to meet the hammockade of Webbo District Commissioner Edmund Gibson on a school day. But I did meet him because Principal Wonplo Dixon Donmo of Jatoke F.E. School closed down the school so that we would walk for roughly an hour to a point along the road where Commissioner Gibson’s hammock convoy would pass. Our job was to greet the commissioner with songs and praises. Though Commissioner Gibson was genuinely glad to see us and I was thrilled for the opportunity to deliver my school’s “Welcome” address, I did not have a natural desire to be a part of those occasions. I believe, however, that the advocates for the restoration of the Providence Island have their reasons. I heard part of it on the radio when a speaker said that visitors to Liberia needed to know how the country was founded. I could guess the rest because I was taught the Liberian history in school.
I therefore believe that anyone visiting Liberia will be hard pressed not to see that this country was founded by people who came from someplace else.
Any international traveler to Liberia is most likely to enter the country through Roberts International Airport. Unlike, for instance, the Kotoka International Airport of Ghana, Liberia’s Roberts International Airport leaves no clue that one has just landed in Africa. So, everything points to the settlers from the Americas who came here. The name of the airport is from Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first President of Liberia. The main street leading to downtown Monrovia from the airport is Tubman Boulevard. Once downtown, every street (except for the recently re-named Front Street for Sao Bosoa) has a pioneer’s name on it. Why then must a traveler be dragged to the Providence Island for further evidence of the settlers’ domination? This is the most talked-about, the most written-about, the most studied, and the most pampered group in Liberia, if the official Liberian history is your guide. We also have holidays for three of them (and none for anyone else from any group): Roberts, Newport, and Tubman national holidays. We have cities named for them too: Harper, Buchanan, Marshall, Roberts, Tubman, Tolbert, Benson, Payne, Carey, Brewer, Johnson, Clay, etc.
So, when is enough is enough? I can name a hundred things that are far more important in Liberia today than the spot on which the self-styled pioneers of the Liberian republic landed to stake a claim to this land. I do not, however, doubt that that sort of thing is important to some people at this time than anything else. But I wager that this is a very tiny minority of the Liberian population that feels that way. I even doubt that a majority of the settler community considers it proper to press the issue of the restoration of Providence Island as an agenda item for Liberia under reconstruction. Preserving the already numerous footprints of the settlers in the Liberian history should not take up any more space in the heads of Liberians already crowded by a vicious war. Ever since Liberia became a nation, the bulk of its effort has gone into accommodating the few settlers who came from someplace else to this part of Africa with an idea about building a democracy.
The tribes of the region now called Liberia individually did not have a grasp for what it would take to build a new nation, but they accepted at first to do what they could to see the settlers’ ideas take concrete shapes. But while the natives were waiting for the pioneers’ thoughts to take some recognizable form, the settlers helped themselves to what little the country produced by way of labor and taxes. The colonizers strung the natives along for over 130 years during which they did some pretty ugly things. There is no need to get into that right now, but suffice to say that the natives reacted, and did so rather violently in 1980 with a bloody coup. Euphoric but otherwise unprepared after the coup, the natives lost their grips on political power in barely 10 years in control. A war, more bloody than the coup, followed. It took 14 years before we settled down to trace our steps back to living under and by the law.
Now, I am thinking that we should be wondering what went so terribly wrong that caused us to kill one another in such great numbers. I also know that old habits die hard. This is all the more reason that we should do more to engage our rational faculty, rather than yield easily to our natural craving for dominance over others. Part of the way things were is that everywhere you turned in the capital city of Liberia, you ran into something that told you that the people who settled in the place called Monrovia were not originally African natives. That was fine to a point. The point of saturation for the natives was 1980. But it took all of ten years for the settlers to show that they couldn’t stand being the minority their number in the population suggests.
With the natives barely in charge, the settlers reached their saturation point in 1989 when they reasserted their organizing power in the pursuit of their own aims. They won both militarily and politically. But what I thought we learned from the disaster of the war was that, of the two kinds of victory – military and political – we must stick with the political process, even with all its imperfections, as a means of engaging one another regarding the future of this nation. In other words, I want the next fight to be political, not military. But we have barely begun to set the course to recovery from the bloody war when some elements in the settler community want us to return to glorifying the settlers’ past before finding shelters for our displaced population. So, I believe that the time to engage the schemers is now; not when we are too angry to think for the good of the whole nation.
© Tarty Teh 2007 ; Monrovia, Liberia, January 11, 2007 Contact Tarty Teh : E-mail: tartyteh@aol.com - Phone: (231) 05-653-568
