By Frank K. Mulbah, Esp, Contributing Writer
Did I hear former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf blasting our administration and making ridicuing comments about our officials? Is she saying that we don’t know what we are doing and that she is doubting our capacity to lead?
Mrs. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is right. She’s right for talking back at us and our administration in such a derogatory manner. We have given her leverage too much. We have been overly generous to her. We have been too accommodative of her chronically corrupt administration.
We thought she meant well when it was said she stood for genuine democratic transition in 74 years. We thought she was paying back CDC, the largest opposition party during her regime, for allowing her administration sail uninterruptedly without robust agitation and political cynicism that fatally disturbed many administrations before her regime.
In our extreme generosity in the last nine months, we have closed our eyes and ears over her corrupt bunch of corrupt officials, including her children, to hold key offices.
Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
We have been so overly generous that we resisted calls, and the temptation, to put her on the Golgotha of immediate comprehensive audit of her Government. We resisted the urgency of the imperative to have her account for perennial budget shortfalls, NOCAL’s insolvency where hundreds of millions of offshore monies were at stake.
We could have put her on the wall to produce the US$500,000 which she and her children and protégés commandeered from a Nigeria businessman. We could have held her responsible for the US$15m which she and her Finance Minister, Augustine Ngafuan, jerked from the national coffer in broad day light. We could have demanded the usage of millions of US Dollars she and her Finance Minister, Amara Konneh, raked from the LRA, NPA, NASSCORP, NOCAL, Maritime and other major revenues-rich government entities.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s administration was a composite of kleptocrats, scoundrels, thieves and looters. The Ellen era was a nightmare presided over by “vampires,” as she called them herself, who came to pillage and to asphyxiate Liberia off all its sweets.
We doubted that the nets and traps of her corruption network would still be lively after her tenure. We least expected it. Or better still, we overlooked it, not knowing that the noxious fangs and tentacles of her vampires were still be alive and well in our revolutionary government.
Instead of Ellen bowing gracefully to plead guilty to the huge fiscal mess she left behind, something she confessed when she spoke of two things we did not achieve during her 12 years reign—corruption and reconciliation—she is coming back on us with her face-saving, shameless and unabashed tongue in the so-called US$16b saga.
As a genuine CDCian who always speaks frankly because after all my parents named me Frank, I must admit that we should have known better. We should have known that the woman that we have been overly generous to is a clever charlatan, an untiring rebel, a pathological thieve and a spiteful maverick. We make her protégés and children to stay in our government—steering the affairs of things at lucrative LRA, Central Bank, NASSCORP and other major monies-oriented agencies. We should have known that by so doing, we were putting hungry cats and rats in one box.
But as it is popularly said, it’s better late than never. It’s now time to awake from our slumber. The breaking point of our extreme generosity towards the Ellenocracy is now—right now. At least the United States on whose recommendation we accommodated Ellen and the rest of the world have seen and known our pity for a former leader. And we must be commended for that. However, by her ungrateful, demeaning comments and the continued unrepentant corruptive attitudes of her protégés who are given a space in our government, the honeymoon is over. Ellen has ignited the war, and we must take it to her door steps.
First, we must know—and let our leader George Manneh Gbaku Kpeh Tarpeh Weah know—that state power is in our hands. We must know that it is we who are holding the mantle of power. It’s we that Liberians look up to for direction and guidance.
It’s we who ECOWAS, AU and UN will ask to account for Liberia’s affairs. We need not play—or feel like we are playing second—to anyone or sharing power with anyone. Let’s not continue to speak and act as if we were still in opposition: lamenting and cowing to some external powers. Let’s speak, and act, as the ones holding the baton of power. The soon we know this, the better our fight against the well-determined and evil empire looming over our image and our future will be comprehensive, decisive and successful.
Second, let us invite John Sembe Morlu or any aggressive, upright and well-intentioned auditor or group of auditors to audit the Sirleaf administration. To keep a clean slate, maintain our revolutionary spirit and our virtuous character as a party and a new government, we must draw a tick line of demarcation between our regime and Ellen’s. And we must do so not only in our governmental make-up but also in our fiscal histories. Ellen must account for her stewardship, and George Weah, our leader, must make this happen now. Shielding her and her scoundrels is totally at our own detriment and at the detriment of the future of this country. We must boggle up or boggle out.
Third, and because of the above, we must sack and keep a reasonable distance from all spillover Ellenistic bureaucrats and appointees in our Government, and order them remain in the country until they are audited. Our intertwinement or our mixing up with Ellenites renders our administration susceptible to the cunning, evil ideals of the Ellenocracy—a regime of the corrupt, by the corrupt and for the corrupt. It also blurs the clarity of our roadmap as a party and a government.
Furthermore, our disengagement from Ellenocracy must not leave out or spare the neo-Ellenites. By neo-Ellenites, I refer to individuals who demonstrate the debauched traits and anti-masses attitudes of the Ellen regime. The neo-Ellenites include our own members or even founding members who had worked with and are groomed by the Ellen kleptocracy and are still amongst us working in prominent positions.
Together, the hard-core Ellenites and the neo-Ellenites are all spies, spoilers and fifth-column bureaucrats planted to destroy our government. They are enemies not only of our revolution but also of the masses whom we came to liberate. Our continued association with them will definitely stall and ground the radical leap our government, reduce and taint the popularity of our leaders and subvert the revolutionary ideals of “power to the people” and “change for hope”—the flagship ideals that fertilize the rise of CDC to the mountaintop of national leadership.
Fourthly, and finally, we, the ordinary CDCians must take the responsibility to rise up in persistently pressing our leadership to implement the proposed recommendations. And they must do so now, not tomorrow. This is important because our leadership, particularly our leader, is firm but is also given so much to the inborn spirit of humility, pity, appeasement and compassion. And it is these innate traits that our enemies often exploit to subdue our winning spirit.
Warriors and revolutionaries are not overly compassionate. They don’t forgive antagonists. They cover their behinds. They keep clean and clear their terrains. They don’t embrace enemies. They break the foes’ backbones. Warriors render enemies helpless and fearful of them.
Thus, we must remind our leaders that our regime is at war with a monstrous expire, a Jezebelic monarch. We are confronted with political principalities that are deeply seated, vicious and have come a long way, recorded and credited for mercilessly successively engineering the cruel fall and death of a chain of regimes before us.
While we still have enough time, let’s pick up the political arms and the warring attitude to demobilize this monarch once and for. We did not go out looking for war. They brought the war to us. Let’s take it to their doorsteps.
But unless we overcome the utter pity, the extreme compassion and apolitical and ‘irrevolutionary’ tendencies towards the determined enemies of our revolutionary, as we have been in the last eight months, let’s just get ready to write our own obituary; to see and appreciate the imminent fall and failure of our tenure and the shame and historic dint it owes for us all—leaders and ordinary CDCians as well. For the evil empire we face is unforgiving, cruel and cunning. It only deserves actions that are proportionate and collateral to its magnitude.
Just so you all know this. A hint to the wise…