By Sherman C. Seequeh
…A sad word, and a warning, to the United People’s Party — now tearing down, with press releases, the very home the progressive struggle built for us all.
I write this one with a heavy heart. I am sad — truly sad — to watch the United People’s Party, the house that Gabriel Baccus Matthews built, tearing at its own walls in the open market of the press. Secretary-General against former Secretary-General. Faction against faction. One side calling the other “fake UPP,” “419,” “a criminal syndicate.” The other firing back with “defamation” and “preposterous.” Press release answering press release, like two brothers cursing each other across the yard while the whole town stops to watch. As I see it, this is no small quarrel. This is a great name dragging itself through the mud.
WHAT THE PROGRESSIVES GAVE US
Let the young ones doing this remember what house they are standing in. For more than a hundred years, one party — the True Whig Party — sat on this country like a landlord who never leaves. One family circle. One voice. No real opposition. No free argument. No space for the small man to say a different thing.
Then came the progressives. In 1975, in the cold of exile, Baccus Matthews and his comrades founded the Progressive Alliance of Liberia. They came home, and they shook the throne. In April of 1979, over the price of our own rice, they brought this nation into the streets, and the ground under the old oligarchy cracked for the first time in a century. History now calls Baccus Matthews the father of our multiparty democracy, and the name is correct.
Frankly speaking, the very freedoms we enjoy this morning did not fall from the sky. The freedom to write this column. The freedom to stand on the street corner, curse the government, and walk home safely. The freedom of plenty parties and plenty newspapers. The progressives bought these things for us. They bought them with prison. They bought them with exile. Some of them bought these freedoms with their own blood.
Indeed, one of the very men now being branded “fake” tells us that at nineteen years of age, in 1980, he was beaten and tortured at the Post Stockade for his progressive belief and walked out only on the morning of the coup. Whatever corner he stands in today, that is a dues-paying receipt no insult can ever tear up.
POWER ELUDED THEM, BUT GLORY DID NOT
Here is the bittersweet heart of the progressive story. State power itself always slipped through their fingers. In 1980, the soldiers seized by force what the progressives had loosened by courage. In the years after, the big chair went to others, again and again. The progressives knocked the door open for everybody and then stood aside and watched everybody else walk through it before them.
But hear me well. Power eluded them, yet glory did not. For the UPP and the progressive forces gave Liberia something far bigger than one presidency — they gave her the open society itself. And the party carried, in its ranks, some of the finest minds this soil has ever produced: brave, mature, tactical, dexterous men and women, the living and the departed, who knew how to fight a whole government and still carry themselves like statesmen.
AND NOW, LOOK AT US
So now, look at us. Look well.
The party of Baccus Matthews is today a battlefield of press statements. One camp accuses the other of pocketing two hundred and fifty thousand United States dollars from Madam Sirleaf back in 2011, and four hundred and twenty-seven thousand more from a businessman in 2017. Heavy, heavy charges.
But where is the proof? By the other side’s own answer, these big figures are flung into the public air without a single receipt, without one bank record, without an audit, without even a police report.
And that, my people, is the saddest part of all. The party that taught Liberia how to argue with ideas is now arguing with raw insult and unproven money talk. The movement that once gave us the courtroom of public reason has lowered itself to trial by press release.
THIS IS NOT THE PROGRESSIVE WAY
I must say it plainly, because somebody who loves this house is obliged to say it: this is not the progressive way.
More often than not, the glory of the UPP was never its money — the party was always poor; by one account it cannot even point to a single small house of its own to call a headquarters, after all these long years. No. The glory of the UPP was its maturity.
Its discipline. Its brotherhood in the struggle. Baccus Matthews and his people knew how to disagree hard and still sit at one table. They stood up to Tolbert. They stood up to Doe. And they did not stoop to calling their own founders “fake” in their own father’s house.
Given the fact that the real dispute — whose tenure has expired, and who should now lead — is already sitting before the National Elections Commission, why the cursing? Why the “419”? A party that produced the sharpest legal and political minds of its generation knows exactly where a matter like this belongs. It belongs in a lawful congress, where partisans vote — not in the newspapers, where partisans only bleed.
A WORD TO THE ELDERS, AND A WARNING
So let me turn, with all respect, to the surviving fathers of the progressive struggle — the elders of that great era who are still with us, well and alive. The house is on fire. Your own children are inside it, fighting with matches. Please, come in. Sit them down. Pour the cold water of your wisdom on this thing before it burns clean to the ground. They will hear you where they will not hear one another.
And let me leave the UPP of today with one hard warning. In as much as a family may quarrel, a house that fights itself in public hands the front-door key straight to its enemies.
The old oligarchy your fathers broke is watching this and smiling. The young Liberians who still believe in the progressive name are watching too and losing heart by the day. Every press release you fire into the chest of your own brother is a bullet into the chest of the very legacy you claim to be defending.
So stop. In the name of Gabriel Baccus Matthews, stop. Go to your congress. Settle it like the mature, brave, tactical people you have always been. Do not let the generation that broke a hundred years of tyranny be remembered, in the end, for breaking only itself.
