By Samuel D. Tweah, Jr
The message from Zwedru is not just about opposition unity to end the Rescue Madness; it is about the quality of leadership that moves Liberia to the next level. The ANC political leader Alexander B. Cummings summarized the ravages of current UP leadership thus:
“Instead of building bridges across ethnic and political lines, the Unity Party
government has deepened the cracks, allowing Liberia to regress into dangerous tribal cleavages and partisan extremism. We are being reduced to tribesmen and partisans, rather than citizens bound by a common destiny.
This betrayal of leadership by the Unity Party government is unacceptable.
True leadership demands setting new standards, meeting higher goals, and
taking responsibility — not hiding behind the failures of past regimes.”
For most patriotic non-partisan Liberians, this is the most quintessential part of the speech, the part that answers the generational question of national transformation.
The political leader of Citizens’ Movement for Change (CMC), Musa Hassan Bility, questioned the basis of opposition unity if it is merely anchored on a “power grab” or on repeating the witch-hunts and partisans’ extremism of the Unity Party.
Simeon Freeman, political leader of the Movement for Progressive Change (MPC) has consistently ranted about these institutional depravities in his myriad outpourings against the Unity Party Government.
And this is where the serious planning for opposition unity ought to begin.
I once said that the business of Government is not to pay salary on time or do mundane things. This function is trivial. Our politics has taken trivial aspects of our governance and made them important. We keep political score on when salary is paid and not on how many jobs are created each month. In Zwedru, the opposition leaders clamored to end this trivialization and move to transformative heavy lifting.
Alexander Cummings raises three serious fundamental questions in his speech, but I will treat two of them here: weak institutions and the inability of Government policies and programs to dent poverty.
The Cummings critique raises several questions:
How do we build non-politicized institutions that do the transformative business of Government? Why would or should a $1.2 billion budget or an even higher amount, not have a serious dent on the incidence of poverty in Liberia? Do we think the institutional fight against corruption is achieving results or is merely pandering to the politics of corruption? Why do we not make credit to the private sector an institutional imperative in the way road and power have become imperatives, since even with road and power, it is credit that generates the jobs?
Cummings is asking several more questions than I can list here and whose answers are not as important as the reflections needed to get those answers.
This is the national reflection that is missing in our politics.
Zwedru has given the opposition an opportunity to unite around this reflection and not just around the vitriolic politics of division and strife we see today.
The opposition is challenged to move toward a common position on the institutional questions raised by Cummings and Bility at the forum, questions that have been the hobbyhorse of businessman and political leader Simeon Freeman since his foray into Liberian politics.
The challenge is now up to them and other leaders like Benoni Urey, Tiawan Gongloe among others to develop this common position and use it as a lynchpin of opposition unity.
The clock is ticking and post Zwedru, opposition politics should move toward the substance needed to end what Cummings has described a game of political musical chairs.
By 2029, the UP would have managed Liberia for 18 years since the end of war and the CDC would have managed it for six years.
The Zwedru keynote speaker is arguing it is not sufficient to assign 75 % of the blame to UP and 25 % to the CDC considering their respective years in power—the direction of the current divisive politics; he demands an opposition consensus that solves the complex jobs, credit and investment problems of the country for good!
The challenge and imperative for the opposition could not be sharper!
