Your extensive contributions to advancing Liberia’s foreign policy objectives spanned the decades, beginning in the 1970’s.
I came to know you better as a professional colleague when I served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Liberia. For the first two of my nearly four-year service as Minister of Foreign Affairs, you served as Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, my principal deputy. Although you were many years older than I, you treated me with the utmost respect and accorded me your fullest cooperation.
As professionals, we didn’t agree on everything; but as professionals, we achieved a lot working together for the collective good of the country.
Diplomacy and finesse were so deeply etched on every fiber of your gentle and handsome being that I can’t recall a moment during our stay at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when you lost your temper over anything. You didn’t bring strong emotions to the argument. You brought a sharpness of logic mixed with a smoothness of demeanor that was truly powerful.
Effectively managing the legion of Liberian diplomats across the world and the team at headquarters was no small feat. But your invaluable counsel helped us in no small measure to navigate the challenges and achieve our goals.
In my mind’s eyes, I see you sitting right beside me, smartly dressed as always in one of our regular Monday morning senior management meetings as you slip to me a short note with some factual updates to help buttress my response to the “latitudinal and longitudinal” queries and suggestions of our lively Policy Advisory Council (PAC) member, Alhaji G. V. Kromah, a former member of the collective presidency of one of Liberia’s transitional governments in the 1990’s.
Fast forward, we were to work again on the same team in government when I joined the Cabinet of our illustrious President Joseph Nyuma Boakai in the middle of September 2024. This time you were the Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, the President’s Chief of Staff.
What I noticed was that your proximity to the President did not change your trademark humility and gentle demeanor.
And as happened before, you and I did not always agree on policy choices and approaches, but we still achieved a lot in the interest of the government and people, working together with other wonderful colleagues in government
Although you were much advance in age, your passing came to me and many others as a shock. But as I wrote some years ago in my poem titled “O Death”, death is
“No respecter of seasons and plans.
no respecter of protocol and etiquette.” It just barges in anytime it chooses.
And this time around, death has blown off the life candle of you, my friend, our own Giklor (how we affectionately called you during our days at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). May your gentle soul find peaceful repose in the bosom of Abraham.
