The two sides in the in the quest for autonomy or the creation of a new county for LOWER BONG have traded accusations of mistrust and mismanagement of resources to the disadvantage of progress in their county by political leaders in the area.
But with the LOWER BONG autonomy quest team maintaining their breakaway from the main land Bong County as their solution and the ONE BONG team pushing their continual union, a calls for more support to LOWER BONG are coming as a suggested solution.
The debate was held in a two-part debate sessions of the LMDI sustained debate style flagship platform “DUCOR DEBATE in sequence recently at Salala in LOWER BONG County and Gbarnga in UPPER BONG.
A press statement from the LMDI headed by prominent Liberian Journalist John Kollie, the two sides debated propounding the arguments as sequentially outlined below:
The LOWER BONG AUTNONOMY team presented that just about all of LOWER BONG has no tertiary education facility and that bridges are non-existent within the Bong Mines area to link the people to the rest of the county and country, though the company and community give more to the national budget than most parts of Bong County.
“Our situation is so peculiar so that we have got more than one hundred thousand people living in LOWER BONG with just a single medical Doctor, so ours is not to divide the KPELLEH but to gain the necessary administrative focus for our welfare. KPELLEH people are spread across all counties of Liberia in large numbers, but yet inseparable and so we cannot even imagine separating them because we are simply incapable of doing that”. FAHNBULLEH said.
They contended that there are counties in Liberia with far lower number of people but getting the same amounts provided by central government for development while LOWER BONG has more than one hundred thousand people and with a large land space comparative enough to have county status.
FHANBULEH and team concluded with an argument that LOWER BONG has more people than all counties in South East and as such should be allowed to establish itself into a county.
- b) ONE BONG CAMPAIGN TEAM…They also had a drastic reordering of their team from the Salala gathering. In fact the ONE BONG or UPPER team changed their entire group of leaders. Led by BILL McGILL JONES, the ONE BONG team rebuffed the claims of the LOWER BONG autonomy team about gross lack of administrative focus leading to marginalization and underdevelopment. Helped by JAMES DORBOR SAO, KUSEE L. ARMSTRONG,
- TARWO WONOFAR and RANDALL WEEKS, JONES said arguments by the autonomy team that Bong County’s managers or leaders in the past and now could not and cannot manage the county because the county is big in size and population is not true but that to the contrary, BONG’s size and population have played to its success in the National Geo-politics of Liberia.
JONES presented that autonomy will not do the magic for either the new county if created nor the main land BONG if it stays united. He said that the game change is rather unity of purpose amongst BONG ‘S leaders for the equitable distribution of BONG’S resources now and going forward.
Statistically, the ONE BONG team presented in reaction to claims by the autonomy team the creation of counties in other regions have proved development for the people in the areas. They argued that the created counties of of River Gee, River Cess, Gbarpolu and Margibi have shown no statistical data that their conditions are better after establishment, but that the counties mentioned remain in their state of underdevelopment long after their creation.
JONES and team further presented that the autonomy push by LOWER BONG is a part of the long time general political development theory of power greedy politicians who for power greed push for new counties only for their selfish motives rather than pushing for fairness in the equitable distribution of resources in their counties.
They argued that LOWER BONG has had near fair distribution of BONG’S resources per the statistics in their hand, pointing to schools inevery district in the LOWER BONG region. There was constant rejection to this claim by the autonomy team throughout the Gbarnga session of DUCOR DEBATES.
The ONE BONG team concluded that Bong has not lost administrative focus over LOWER BONG but that the autonomy push is merely for a greedy search for political power by greedy political leaders.
The Gbarnga session of DUCOR DEBATES on LOWER BONG’S quest for autonomy and the creation of a new county was graced by 679 people frankly exchanging views on the both sides.
DUCOR DEBATES is one of three media and community outreach blended People To People flagship platforms of the Liberia Media for Democratic Initiatives (LMDI). Along with the other two, THE DIALOGUE and TOMORROW’S PEOPLE, they sit weekly at locations in cities towns and villages across Liberia, dialoging and debating all issues of concern to Liberians especially the marginalized.
As ever, deliberations from all LMDI programs are produced into media contents for weekly broadcast on a partner network of 45 National and Rural Community Electronic Media Outlets (Radio and TV Stations) across Liberia.