PHOTO: Edith Gongloe-Weh, defeated Nimba County Senatorial candidate; Some crucial factors were clearly in her favor…
Substantively since things tend to be relative, it’s necessary to contextualize the Supreme Court’s lack of “sufficient evidence” ruling.
According to NEC data, for the December 8, 2020 midterm senatorial election in Nimba County, 302,843 potential voters had registered in the county.
However, as it’s usually in midterm elections, the voters turnout was less than 50 percent. A total of 111,516 votes were cast in the December 8, 2020 election in Nimba, constituting 36.82 percent of the registered voters, according to the NEC. In other words, less than 40 percent of registered voters turned out in the December 8th election. This means that a staggering 191,227 registered voters, or 63.18 percent didn’t see any compelling reason to cast their votes in the December 8, 2020 election.
In all, seven candidates took part in that election—six male candidates and one female candidate. Even though there were seven candidates, realistically, public attention had focused on the CPP candidate, Mrs. Edith Gongloe-Weh and Senator Prince Johnson’s anointed candidate, Mr. Jeremiah Koung, who was also being supported by the ruling CDC. Despite the multiple numbers of candidates, some crucial factors were clearly in favor of Mrs. Weh, which her opponents were aware of.
One of such factors is that Nimba County has not been a particularly misogynistic county in the past. When I was in grade school in the county, some gallant women with the requisite political orientations had formed an integral part of the county’s legislative delegations from time to time. Names like Representative Dwanyen Dokie and Senator Catherine B. Cummings, among others, are still vividly remembered in the county and beyond.
In short, the current obnoxious male dominance in Nimba politics is a regressive by-product of a self-serving, an ethnocentric ex-warlord’s posturing, which has no socio-cultural, political basis. Due to such glaring gender deficit, the forward-looking women of Nimba County were determined to deliver the deliverables for Mrs. Weh in the December 8, 2020 election, and true to their vows, they did deliver, except that their expressed will was fraudulently hijacked.
In addition to the women, the young people of Nimba County have pathetically watched their county fast becoming a sort of laughing stock in the past 15 years or so. Our young people know that Nimba County continues to be the economic hub of Liberia, yet it virtually has nothing tangible to showcase for its tremendous contributions to the national economy.
As a result, they have been yearning for a lawmaker who will articulate their perspectives, their aspirations as Honorable Larry Younquoi, for example, and a few others are doing. They desire a Senator who will actually be respected by his or her peers, by people across the country and even beyond, rather than a tainted figurehead so obsessed about personal pecuniary gains. It was amid such aura of favorable factors that Mrs. Edith Gongloe-Weh contested the December 8, 2020 election in Nimba.
Based on the official data of the NEC, Mr. Koung, the declared “winner” had garnered 37,899 votes, or as per NEC posting, 36.17 percent of the votes, with 34,153 votes for Mrs. Weh, or 32.55 percent of the votes.
The same NEC’s tabulation indicated that Mr. Koung, the MDR/CDC candidate who was actually defeated 46 percent to 29 percent in his home district, had “won” with 3,746 votes or 3.62 percent of the votes more than the CPP candidate in the aggregate tabulation. Noticeably, 6,592 votes were declared “invalid” by the local election workers.
Against this backdrop, it is very difficult for one to fathom the rationale for the Supreme Court’s reasoning that the frauds and irregularities which characterized the December 8th election in certain parts of Nimba County were not “sufficient” to reverse the winner’s victory, as if the declared winner had snatched a decisive landslide, insurmountable victory in that election.
Mrs. Weh had alleged irregularities, she had alleged that frauds did occur; it was not NEC officials that relentlessly did a meticulous job in uncovering those frauds or irregularities. As far as the NEC was concerned, it was business as usual; they didn’t detect anything wrong with the electoral process in Nimba County at the time. If anything, local NEC staff, perhaps due to intense intimidation, or for ethnocentric reasons, had participated in infringing the law/rules.
When the Edith Gongloe-Weh campaign initially alerted the local Election Magistrate in Sanniquellie, he adopted a smack down attitude toward the CPP complaint; there was an outright denial, which warranted Mrs. Weh’s campaign to seek redress at the NEC headquarters in Monrovia. And so, technically, the NEC was the judge and co-defendant at the onset of the case. Against such backdrop, if any evidence was adduced and correlatively verified in the process of the investigation, such evidence should have logically been weighed in favor of the plaintiff/appellant, instead of the NEC and ultimately the Supreme Court adopting a defensive pushback with a feeble rationalization.
For the nation’s highest court, which is not only a court of law but also a tribunal for arbitration to exert an extraneous effort of trivializing those pieces of evidence presented by the plaintiff/appellant as being “insufficient”, without cogently, unequivocally stipulating its metrics of determining what in its purview, constitutes sufficiency is undesirably mindboggling, to say the least. Saying that there were frauds, but not sufficient frauds is like saying that a woman is pregnant, but not sufficiently pregnant, which is utterly irrational, because either a woman is pregnant, or not.
It goes without saying that if, from the perspective of the court, there was no fraud, the court should have simply declared that, but to reluctantly concede that frauds did occur and still allow the results of such fraudulent election to stand presupposes that some frauds are indeed, permissible under Liberian election law.
Claiming that the pieces of evidence presented were not sufficient implies that those who commit crimes are some sorts of dummy, who will knowingly, willfully do something nefarious; who will circumvent the law and readily lay bare self-incriminating footprints for eventual apprehension.
No, that’s not the reality of life. In the real world, criminals are extremely relentless in cavaliering their whims and caprices because they harbor the proclivity that they’re smarter than the rest of the society. Even when they are red-handedly caught, they fiercely deny their shady deeds. I strongly believe that any system that is evidently fraught with frauds will definitely produce a flawed outcome. As the Supreme Court reluctantly conceded, the December 8, 2020 election in Nimba was fraught with frauds and irregularities, and because of that, the result is obviously flawed.
When I read about the Supreme Court’s opinion, I simply reasoned that it was the court’s way of stamping its authority on the ongoing cabaI-like interactions involving Senator Johnson and the two immediate post-conflict governments in Monrovia. That is, perhaps due to the fact that the two post-conflict presidents were/are not conventional blue-collar warlords with known armed groups, they had apparently forged an informal “non-aggression pact” with the Senator, effectively surrendering that portion of Liberia known as Nimba County to the fear-prone prince, to be his fiefdom for all intents and purposes, or better still, his principality with His Royal Highness calling the shots; of course, with the acquiescence of the national government in Monrovia, to the detriment of majority of Nimbaians.
In the specific case of President Sirleaf, from the onset, she had sought to distance herself from the former INPFL (so-called Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia) “Field Marshall” during the Unity Party convention in Saclepea in 2005. The warlord General had failed to garner sufficient votes from the party delegates for his senatorial bid. Having failed to secure a UP victory, the “Field Marshall” later ran as an independent candidate. But once he ran as an independent and won, Sirleaf readily embraced him.
Politicians are abundantly aware that democracy is not so much about quality; it’s mainly quantity that matters, because number happens to be the primary determinant.
And so, in the case of candidate Sirleaf, the first round of Liberia’s first crucial post-conflict election had been held. A plethora of presidential candidates had participated and shockingly, a footballer (soccer player) with a questionable academic credential and miniscule government experience, if any, had emerged as the frontrunner, snatching 28 percent of the votes. She had come second with about 20 percentage point.
Meanwhile, in Nimba County where both candidates—Sirleaf and Weah–didn’t do too well, an enigmatic ex-warlord known for his grotesque, macabre past had clinched the status of a folk hero, a kingmaker, if you will, thanks to Samuel Doe’s decade of ethnocentric suppression and the shameless hijacking of the October 15, 1985 election, denying the erudite Jackson F. Doe the presidency, which had basically alienated the Nimba people. More than 80,000 votes had been cast for the erstwhile “Field Marshall.” Apparently panic erupted within the ranks of Liberian political elites as their dream of returning to power appeared doubtful at that point in time.
Of course, the result was the usual intrigues and tradeoffs of politics, and when George Weah ascended to the throne, he, too, apparently signed on, perhaps to ensure his political relevance and survival. In fact, prior to the second round of the 2017 election, George Weah and Prince Johnson had attended a special anointing worship service in Nigeria hosted by the late Pastor T.B. Joshua.
It’s such opaque interactions which have today made Nimba County a sort of principality in Liberia at the whims and behest of one man named Senator Prince Johnson.
Of course, it’s to the glee of those who seem to be terrified by the potential of the county. For them, that’s the best case scenario, because they’re conscientiously aware that enabling Nimba County to optimize its potential is adversarial to their egregious political interests. Why? Because they know that if given a level playing field, Nimba has the socio-economic, cultural, human, political resources to leap forward.
If today Nimba County doesn’t have its popularly desired representation in the Liberian Senate, it’s not because Nimbaians didn’t cast their votes for their desired candidate in the December 8, 2020 midterm senatorial election; it’s not because the CPP candidate in Nimba failed to present “sufficient evidence”. Instead, it’s because “Ninety-nine days are for rogue, one day is for master”, and one day, the irrefutable truth will be revealed when those scoundrels are apprehended.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Columnist Joe Bartuah is the Chief Editorial Officer of Lib-Variety, a free media advocacy and blogging website published by Consolidated Media, Incorporated. He has been a member of the Inky Fraternity for more than three decades. You can contact him @ Joebartuah@lib-variety.org or mienwon2001@gmail.com.