By
Alfred P. B. Kiadii
Frantz Fanon warned us: ‘The future will have no pity for those men who, possessing the exceptional privilege of being able to speak words of truth to their oppressors, have taken refuge in an attitude of passivity, of mute indifference, and sometimes of cold complicity.”
Politics must be lubricated with the sense of national consciousness, patriotism and public spiritedness. A politics that takes these virtues into consideration and makes them the thrust and centre of national life is one that prioritizes the promotion of the general in contrast to the self and thus creates the condition for the ascent of the people to increase their capacity and master the law of nature and use technology to improve civilization. Conversely, a politics which is based on no conviction and raft of principles is one which promotes the self, relying on deception, trickery and intrigue to throw oneself on the stage of history, thus using the people as pitiful cannon fodder to achieve material splendour.
The tragedy of our country is the tragedy of the formation of political outfit on tribal irredentism and short-sighted ends, where one’s loyalty is to the tribe and makes social progress only when an element of his tribe is catapulted to national political leadership. This engenders a toxic fight in every election because one thinks that social mobility is not based on merit but a product of tribal patronage where kinsman politics and other vicious manipulations substitute for merit, national consciousness and fair play within the polity. This political oddity brushes aside the question of class domination and endeavours to limit the analysis of contradictions in the society to the constricted plane of the tribe, thereby distorting the struggle for social emancipation and the prioritization of the genuine itinerary which focuses on national advances in all aspects of human development. Hence our national disaster!
Our quest for a transformed homeland is essentially our search for human dignity—that dignity to assert ourselves, that dignity to exploit the wealth provided by nature to ensure national transformation, that dignity to unwind the masses of the people from the clutches of mysticism and superstition to a celestial pinnacle of mastering the environment and using the tools of science to live a decent life. We are referring to a dignity which regardless of social status and name, affords everyone an opportunity based on merit to demand better and build a great nation out of this space. Such dignity holds that in order for the society to make a quantum leap in the appropriate direction our people’s thought must be enriched by a sense of history so that they can participate in the affairs of politics and build an inclusive society, as throughout history it is the people—conscious and determined—behind a popular vanguard who can build a progressive society.
Besides, in a third country such as ours, a leader must not be a person who is affluent in material accumulation based on wholesale plunder of the national treasury. A leader must have spiritual affluence in contrast to material opulence, as the latter provides said individual with the crusading zeal to confront the contradictions of stagnation and backwardness that are break on social progress. Such person must be someone who throws himself/herself against all odds, making the ultimate sacrifice in order for the mass of the people to advance and usher in a higher form of civilization where nature will not take a violent toll on them but would use it for social emancipation. Our understanding of leadership and people we celebrate must be based on an appreciation of their struggles and the vanguard role they play in smashing the wretched trajectory of society to deliver a new society where the mass of the people will become masters of their destiny and faith which enable them to contribute to the flourishing of their environment.
Historical accident has generated historical mirages and irresponsible nobodies on the centre stage of the national politics - one of the fundamental factors that has deprived Liberia of the social advance that we analysed above. Some of elements, not possessing national consciousness, have stagnated the people in a very nasty orgy. This brings me to the rotten vestige of a dying order in Amara M. Konneh, who is a lousy yellow belly, a well-known tribalist, and serial swindler who is an embodiment of all of the aberrations of national leadership and honest statesmanship. This wretched soul panders to the politics of religious fundamentalism and tribal irredentism. He toys with the fantasy of using the narrow formation of his tribe and religious heritage to project himself at the apex of national political leadership. This man, Amara M. Konneh, a noisy gate-crasher who wants to exploit the fractures in these social formations due to the low level of political awareness of our people, which can be attributed to the underdevelopment of the productive forces, is not a national leader but a national scoundrel, and not a patriot but a national traitor, and not a nationalist but a crude ethnicist.
Those proclivities make the megalomaniac, in addition to his use of treachery and intrigue to hoodwink others, an undesirable candidate for national political leadership in our society. They make him incapable of contributing to the task of national renewal and the nation-building efforts geared at delivering material emancipation to the mass of the population weighed down by the smorgasbord of social alienation, grinding poverty and economic deprivation. He is no visionary who is pierced with pains when his people suffer the cruelty of hunger, humiliation and deprivation. Konneh is nothing more than a robber bureaucrat who is lust after power, prestige and money and thus possesses an ambitions which far surpasses his capabilities. That, in order to achieve such ends, he distributes pittance from the loot he amassed to buy loyalty and make people to toe his line.
Amara M. Konneh is an acolyte of a status quo politics that has long kept the homeland as a plantation from America transplanted on African soil, exploiting the subaltern classes and the urban masses as the nation remains a raw material producing vassal for countries of the capitalist metropoles. His understanding of governance is essentially the mortgaging of our natural resources to the multinationals and transnationals in return for pittance in rent, taxes and royalties that are capable of producing a 91 percent recurrent expenditure budget and a paltry 9 percent capital expenditure in social programs for health, education and infrastructure. This pattern of political economy which spokespersons of the decayed socio-economic order call the modern development model for countries of the Global South has failed to improve the income levels of peoples of the third world; it has failed to increase the nutritional content of the diet of our young people so that their mental capacity develops and thus lead the complex effort of the reorganization of society so that wealth can benefit all.
People like Amara Konneh are the break on national progress and transformation. He comes from a cabal which has no progressive idea to drag the republic out of its social backwardness but strives on dominance, imbalance and brutal exploitation of the people and their natural resources. As the distribution of wealth is unequal—a disproportionate portion goes to the cabal while a morsel is given to the mass of the people who toil for survival and see no rest except in the grave. He is a member of that cartel which retards and substitutes national development for national plunder and self-enrichment. That cabal with all of its greedy proclivities has no progressive fraternal developmental narrative for the mass of the exploited and oppressed people of our fatherland.
This get-rich-quick conman is incapable of espousing great ideas and a proper perspective for the progressive emancipation of the people other than vomiting those staid concepts and guesswork from the textbooks of the IMF and World Bank which have been the main menaces that have decimated and ravaged the African people after the attainment of flag independence in the 1960s. The period which predates it was not only a century of colonial exploitation of the labour and natural resources of the African people but also four centuries of the brutal Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – this brutal and inhumane forced labouring distorted historical development in Africa and produced vast surplus for capitalism in Europe and North America. The World Bank and IMF are the products of the Washington Consensus with its neoliberal agenda for third world countries which are the bulwark for guaranteeing European and American capitalism so that five centuries of robbing Africans of their future are not enough.
These institutions create the framework for the development of a parasitic national bourgeoisie which Amilcar Cabral referred to as false bourgeoisie in third world countries. They are false bourgeoisie because they did not evolve from the ruins of decayed feudalism to own the means of production in the new society like their counterparts in the capitalist centre. This false bourgeoisie amasses its wealth by plundering the national treasuries of third world countries. This trend is the basis for creating that comprador class that uses the apparatuses of the third world states to pander to the whims and caprices of the prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF whose major aim is to create the condition for the exploitation of the resources and labour of the African people by foreign monopoly capital. It is within this framework one must understand the role of the scumbag Amara Konneh!
These elements expect revolutionaries to tremble at the mention of the names of the troika of economic dominance of imperialism—World Bank, IMF and WTO. They must be psychopathic to think that we would be impressed that Amara Konneh is a cog in the machine of that imperialist organization established principally to protect the imperialist interests of the triad: United States of America, Western Europe and Japan. Must we tell these people that in 1971 the Nixon administration signed a pact with the Wahhabi dictatorship of Saudi Arabia for the latter to sell its oil product in dollars in exchange for the US to provide weapons to save the decayed House of Saud, thus abandoning the international gold standard and introducing the petrodollar and making the dollars as the currency for international trade. It changed the dollar from a worthless paper to an international reserve currency.
Must we tell them the complicity of the IMF, World Bank and WTO in the war launched against Col. Mummar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein simply because the duo opted to leave that petrodollar pact and toyed with the idea of creating a new currency for the sale of their crude products? And currently, should we tell them the complicity of the troika of economic dominance of imperialism in aiding and abetting the US to sabotage and destabilize the economy of Venezuela simply because the people of the land of Simon Bolivar have refused to be subjected to the whims and caprices of imperialism and the diktats of its troika of economic dominance? Have they asked why the heads of the IMF and World Bank are either Europeans or Americans?
I don’t want to recount the famine, deaths and other casualties by the structural adjustment policy of those institutions in Africa in the 1980s. I am not bother in the least at these institutions that are established to further the interest of the triad. As a man of conscience I educate our people against the disastrous policies of these institutions. Suffice it to mean whether Amara Konneh works there or not or even becomes head of anything there doesn’t erase the fact that he is a common thief who must be condemned to prison.
HB an embodiment of virtues, Amara an embodiment of awful vices
Since the arch-crook Amara harboured the ambition of becoming a leader of the republic at a certain time in his sordid life, the sponger started cleaning up himself in ways to not detect fraud and expose him as an economic imbecile whose claim to fame is avarice, plunder and theft. As he resigned his position, the poster boy and his political godmother and mother-in-law initiated a farcical audit to vindicate him. They then found a plaint stooge in Boima Kamara to hire a fly-by-night auditing firm to do their bidding. And the ridiculous audit was conducted, thus vindicating Amara of all charges in anticipation of any inquiry in the near future. The fact that the audit was done hastily says much about the mind-set of the people and the reason behind such rush.
For a man who stole funds meant to address structural imbalances in our healthcare sector and reduce maternal fatalities, for a social pimp whose hands were caught in the cookie jar by the Warner Committee, for a yokel whose record of public service is overwhelmed with scandal, for a guy who climbed through the ranks and file of the government by gossiping and bring others down, hiring a low key auditing firm to give him a clean slate is a child’s play. This is why for Amara Konneh insofar as the miserable exploitation of the people can land loot in his many bank accounts and give him fame, the people can be used as experimental Guinea pigs, as he did in the last election by when his cabal orchestrating a scheme to impose George M. Weah on us through a bogus electoral process.
But we have news for this chap who thinks he has the clairvoyance to outsmart everyone: Whether hundred years or thereabout, Amara Konneh, like President Bio has done in Sierra Leone, you will be dragged before a judicial commission of inquiry to account for your stewardship in public service. Even before that, that discredited audit done by that bogus auditing firm will be discarded and rubbished to the trashcan. KPMG Auditing Firm will be invited to conduct an audit of you for becoming an overnight millionaire. You can comfort yourself and think you are so smart to not be busted, but your day of reckoning is soon in spite of the charade. The presidential position you are chasing which far exceeds your abilities will be your undoing. History will have its last laugh on you!
Meanwhile, we are aware of your supermarket chain in Philadelphia, as well as your loot in Conakry, Guinea. They will be confiscated and used for the benefit of the people. And by that time, you the rascal will be serving prison term in an orange jumpsuit. This fate seems like a fantasy to befall you for the cynics who cannot see beyond their noises, but soon this will be the lot of the mocking little imp in Amara Konneh!
Unlike Amara Konneh’s role in public service in the homeland which is stained and pockmarked with avarice, theft and loot, at a tender age Dr. H. Boima Fahnbulleh, Jr found a path and direction in life: standing with the people and struggling against backward tendencies, and at the forefront of noble causes that tend to liberate society from bondage and push it in the epoch of social justice and plenty. This calling has been the motivation for his involvement in the politics of the republic, to which he comes with virtues that distinguish him from others and thus put him in a unique league of immortals.
His service as Minister of Education led to tremendous transformation in the sector in a very short stint. Just to name few tours de force of his at the ministry of education: free education, adult literacy program, the abolishment of activities fees, the purchasing of books at an affordable and adjusted prices, and other deliverables too numerous to name. Similarly, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he ensured that the PRC regime was accepted by global bodies such as the UN, ECOWAS, OAU and now AU, etc. He used his shrewd diplomatic skills to ensure Liberia reclaim her glory within the realm of international relations. The Liberian missions across the world received their funds to operate within the appropriate time frame. Seasoned diplomats and economic attachés and other specialized individuals were assigned at those missions to seek opportunities for the country in keeping with its national interest.
I say the ideas expressed by us and the nature of our activism is one about the transformation of Liberia and the bringing of the people into history, as that is the only way we can extricate the homeland from the thralldom of economic backwardness, where they will be totally involved in the national development of the country. This will end the era of the development of underdevelopment and begin the process of Liberia choosing the path of self-determination in its internal and external affairs and exerting control of its economic activities. Then the framework of constructing a new society where machine and the instrument of human labor will not be used as instruments of exploitation, but will be organized for the production of abundance for the common good of all and thus create leisure so the people can participate in other aspects of social development.