Cleansing The Face & Soul of a Nation: 
        Beginning With the Police…. 

These became the
Police officers

11 May 04

Events in Liberia are moving so fast, for the better, that keeping up is futile. The decision that the Police Force will be thoroughly vetted to free it of incompetents and criminals would have seemed impossible months ago. It is now possible. Never say never, indeed.

Of course, like all institutions in the country, an appropriate step would be to simply bundle the criminals up and send them to where they belong--in prison—-that is if justice were universal. But since it is not, such individuals are allowed, "in the name of peace", to pretend to be heads of parliament and other key positions.

Setting standards—in both qualification and integrity—will be a difficult undertaking in a nation now at peace with mediocrity. Since the 1980s, merit has succumbed to patronage built on brutality. Samuel Doe therefore declared that “Da nor book will build this country”, meaning that since he had no talents or education, his likes would rule, and they did, with horrific consequences so visible.  In 1997, Charles Taylor’s child soldiers chanted, “Book people time fini…” again signalling that it was the era of stupidity and mediocrity, and of  the child soldier as a police officer, an armed robber as a minister of bank governor, etc. The result of this horrible psyche is what is prevailing in the country—the total destruction of the civil service and stuffing it with individuals incapable of spelling their names correctly, let alone run a nation. Key institutions required for nation-building have been mortgaged to men and women not on the basis of their character, not on the merit of their training or education, not on account of their experience in given positions, but on their brutish ability to shout and then to shoot and kill.  Without cleansing the government and its institutions of such criminals, as will be the case with the Police, before October 2005, what should be expected is that they will re-emerge in suits as respectable leaders, just as was the case in 1997 when Charles Taylor and his rebel enterprise emerged to continue the horrors. Men like George Dweh will be re-elected by his kinsmen to lead the next parliament and thus not only forever escape justice, but set the stage for another round of violent conflict. Allowing this,with  the dangerous belief that this compromise with crime is  “in the name of peace”, will be a false start, an anteroom for renewed conflict, because peace without justice soon leads to anarchy.  

The American chief of UN police Mark Kroeker, is ensuring that this will not be the case with the Police, an institution key to security and therefore stability that has been packed with the best-known criminals any society can produce and led by the most accomplished crooks in society. That it will be cleansed to make it respectable means a slow but determined departure from the standards Charles Taylor and before him Samuel Doe ensured to ensure a national catastrophe.

The first laudable and symbolic step is that the current name of the Police Force, an incongruous and stained name, will be altered from Liberian National Police to Liberia Police Service (LPS). (Liberia is a unitary state. The word Liberia is therefore the same as “national”, and there are no regional police establishments to warrant the distinction ”national.”) But in an uninformed attempt to appeal to non-existent nationalism, the speaker of rebel-packed interim parliament, the rebel commander George Dweh, contends the UN has no right to alter the name of a national institution. A simple response is that the UN had no right to enter Liberia and end the killing sprees and barbarities of men like him. What would have been appropriate to end this charade, rejected in the name of bread of butter for politicians and their rebel counterparts, was a UN trusteeship so that men like Dweh would have no say in transforming a nation they have bastardised only for others to spend millions in attempting to get back on track. Moreover, no one has the right to change the name of the National Legislature to Interim Transitional Assembly, or something like that, which derives its illegitimacy on the ability of its leaders to shoot and kill and thereafter make politics a criminal’s game.

But the Police are a good place to start in the soul cleansing necessary for sustainable peace. Change of name, for institutions and at times individuals, can lead to changem of image. If the country’s name could be changed from Liberia to something else, the image rebel enterprises and the brutalities of the military in the 1980s gave it could slowly wither. Upper Volta was re-named Burkina Faso. Dahomey was re-named Benin, while we now have the Democratic Republic of the Congo instead of Zaire,  Zimbabwe, instead   Southern Rhodesia  and Zambia,  Northern Rhodesia in place  of , etc. 

This vetting of a nation of criminals and charlatans is a healthy beginning. Soon, and this a prophesy, we will see the same within the Executive Mansion, the Ministry of Finance, Justice, etc. It is becoming a new dawn.