By Sherman C. Seequeh
There is a new virus lose in Liberia, and it is not in the hospitals. It is in the ruling party. I have taken the liberty of naming it, since our Doctor of Politics have been too polite to the Partisan Solidarity Apathy Virus — the PSA Virus for short — a fast-spreading political contagion that empties a governing party’s headquarters while its leaders are still congratulating themselves inside. It has no cure in any pharmacy, and it is airborne wherever a promise is broken.
We watched it flare up in the open yesterday, on the Unity Party’s Green Day, when the chairs outnumbered the faithful and a desperate official was reduced to promising the crowd food and cold water if only, they would come back and make the yard look busy. A ruling party bribing its own base with soft drinks: that, my people, is the PSA Virus in full bloom.
HOW THE VIRUS IS CAUGHT
Like every serious disease, PSA has a cause, and this one is not a mystery. It is caught from broken promises — promises of jobs that never came, business opportunities that were sworn on the campaign platform and buried the morning after inauguration, a better life for the nation that remains, two years on, a rumor.
The partisan who walked in the sun in 2023 was promised he would eat. He is still hungry. And hunger, it turns out, is the single most efficient carrier of Partisan Solidarity Apathy known to science.
The virus travels fastest through the phone. In the opposition days, the big man’s number rang, and he answered on the second ring — “myPartisan! my brother! we are together!” Today that same number rings into the void. The calls are not picked. The messages are seen and never answered. The comrade who once begged for your vote now cannot spare you a text, and the foot-soldier, staring at his unanswered screen, feels the first cold symptom of the PSA Virus creeping into his bones.
THE DARK WINDSHIELD: A CLINICAL SIGN
There is a physical marker of the disease, and any Liberian can spot it from the roadside. It is the dark windshield. In the days of struggle, the aspiring official rode with his window down, his arm out, calling greetings, slapping palms, “small something” passing from his hand to the crowd.
Now the glass is tinted black, the window stays up, and the vehicle sweeps past the very junction where he once campaigned, never slowing, never rolling down, the man inside invisible to the people who made him. When the windshield goes dark, the diagnosis is confirmed: the PSA Virus has reached the eyes.
The other clinical sign is geographic: the sudden disappearance of the official from the places of ordinary life. He no longer darkens the door of the party headquarters. He no longer sits at the local atayee center, that humble parliament of tea and argument where partisans once thrashed out the fate of the nation over a hot cup.
Those corners knew him once. Now they know only his absence, and the absence itself spreads the apathy like a cough in a crowded room.
FROM COMRADE TO BOURGEOIS
Observe, too, the strange transformation the virus works on its host. The men who yesterday called themselves your allies, your colleagues, your fellow sufferers in the trenches, have overnight become patricians — a new bourgeoisie in borrowed suits, speaking a language of committees and convoys that the ordinary partisan no longer understands. The “we” of the campaign has quietly split into “us” and “them,” and the foot-soldier has discovered which side of that line he was always meant to stand on. Nothing breeds apathy in a follower faster than watching his comrade become his overlord.
SYMPTOMS IN THE BODY OF THE POOR
And here the comedy runs out, because the final symptoms are written not on the official but on the citizen. The PSA Virus does its cruelest work in the belly. It shows itself in the empty pot, in the market bill that cannot be settled, in the child sent home from school for fees, in the landlord at the door.
The partisan does not abandon the party out of spite; he abandons it out of exhaustion, because a man who cannot feed his family has no strength left to clap for the people who left him this way. The apathy is not rebellion. It is fatigue. It is the quiet of a body too weak to cheer.
That is the true face of this virus: not merely thin crowds at a Green Day, but a whole base worn down by lack, watching the men they lifted ride by behind dark glass while the pot at home stays empty.
THE ONLY CURE
Let me offer the free medical advice the party’s own physicians will not. There is no vaccine for the PSA Virus in a catering budget. Rice and soft drinks treat the symptom for an afternoon and leave the disease to deepen overnight. The only cure is the hard one: keep the promises. Answer the phone.
Roll the window down. Return to the headquarters and the atayee center as a comrade and not a lord. Put food in the people’s own pots, not merely on a folding table for one photographed afternoon. Do that, and the crowds return on their own legs, for free, singing.
Refuse it, and no amount of catered rice will save them. The virus will run its course the way it always does in our politics — quietly, patiently, from the headquarters to the heart, and finally, in its own good time, to the ballot box. A party can survive many things. It has never yet survived being abandoned by the people who once loved it for nothing.
