These, the fleeing refugees, must be at the centre of sustaible  peace

Seek Ye Only Power and All Others Shall Come

 By Tom Kamara

22 May 04

The Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka, in a BBC lecture delivered recently, directed his formidable mind towards, amongst others, the banality of power, saying that even the insane finds power seductive. He named as one of the examples of the 20^th century use of banal and crude power “Sergeant Doe” (as he called the Liberian president Samuel K Doe who rose from a Master Sergeant to a 5-star General.)

That the more banal and insane an individual, the greater the obsession with power is an assertion filled with examples: Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Pol Pot, Hitler, Son of Sam, the list goes on. It is an interesting observation that fits developments in Liberia, where since 1980, all those who want to be something both economically and otherwise, gravitate towards the attainment of power. The array of presidential candidates for a nation of barely 3m or less signifies how the concept of power is forming all other relations in a poverty stricken state. The prevailing obsession with power was evident in Ghana, where politicians and rebels met not with the intent of devising means for an exit out of the trap of poverty and inefficiency, but merely to share power and therefore the resources that power assures those who wield it. The line-up of officials, some “black money criminals” (criminals, many Liberians, roaming with deceptions that they are capable of transforming useless paper into millions of US dollars via some strange chemicals and not lacking believers) and failed individuals, is a testament that power alone can conceal mediocrity, for one commanding it is beyond probe. And since power does not require intellect in places like Liberia, its crude use is seen as a virtue. (Y’all know me, Charles Taylor, I don’t play…If you enter your ma womb, we will find you….”  “You will not live to tell the story”: Samuel Doe. ) Thus the more insane and crude the individual, the more likely he/she will attain power in such a setting. George Dweh, Foday Sankoh, Sam Bockarie, come to mind because they see power as a right of coercion, a badge to force submission of the enemy, the right to ensure that one’ will prevails through fear and force. 

Ike Coleman, a regular contributor to this site, touched on the adverse effects of this now acceptable and rolling notion of power. He gave some reasons for the absence of Liberian entrepreneurs in a parasitic economy dominated by foreign interests and commanded by foreign merchants, since the most profitable and save “professional” undertaking now is the attainment of power, whether via farcical means called elections, or through rebel wars of fortune. Mr. Coleman’s observation is interesting for its reality. The agony of a yanna boy (peddler) being forced to surrender his daily earnings to a policeman exercising the power of extortion over him. The bitterness of bribing an official to have a business registered in order to make a decent living. The excruciating mental pains of paying taxes so that those who wield power can use the money not for education, roads, health, etc.,  but to send concubines, wives and children to America for shopping or for education or to pay their mortgages. The knowledge that those who wield power can, without protest, mortgage national resources (Maritime, the forests, granting monopolies for profitable businesses, and demanding, as Charles Taylor did, that all newspapers in the country surrender 20% of their yearly earnings to him despite the payment of regular taxes) at the expense of everyone else. All these tenants of crude use of power have made politics the most profitable venture, relegating the search for professional improvement to a failure’s world. 

But such pains are primarily those of nationals, not the Lebanese or foreign merchants with absolutely no guilt in criminalising the economy via bribing the official to avoid taxes and to maximise profits sent home to Lebanon, where they are unlikely to avoid taxes, and moreover, where the profits made in Liberia are used for the development of their nation or to back one of the many militias, as the Douglas Farah told a Congressional hearing this year. Pains and anger come with the realisation that a wrong is being perpetrated and that the payment of exactions to an official is a form of armed robbery.

Political power at the centre of all things, and the rise of the mediocre to exercise it, sets the stage for more economic collapse and therefore a cycle of wars over the contest for power. If an environment in which a yanna boy could rise to become a small shop owner is made impossible by individuals who believe power gives them right to exact fees from their preys, then there could be no more powerful recruiting sergeant than the official, because he is leaving the yanna boy no opportunity but to vie for power not through electoral politics for he is not prepared, but by belonging to the Small Boys Unit or the “Forest Battalion” of LURD. If a soldier is excluded from the political and therefore economic spheres, and he is allowed to own that instrument of power—the gun—then he uses it, as Samuel Doe and his comrades did   not to redeem the people as they lied in 1980, but to redeem their miserable selves. 

This psyche—power as the ultimate tool for wealth and of absolute control over one’s enemies —is perhaps the most damaging in building an economically viable nation. Liberia was arguably founded on the seductiveness of power, in that the settlers (Americo-Liberians, descendents of freed slaves who settled in the country in 1822) made power the anteroom to all other social and economic relations. If you represented power, privileges were assured. If you wielded power, you could steal from the state, build a house, and rent it to the state at a price you determine. Power gave its holder the right to imprison, in some cases kill without being questioned, as in the case of Charles Taylor, Jr., who shot and killed his driver without a minute of detention, amongst series of examples.

The 1980s, the rise of the corrupting military dictatorship, pushed this notion further into its lunatic abyss. It threw to the centre of power and wealth individuals not on the basis of their talents, of their discipline, but because of ethnicity or loyalty to the individual. Charles Taylor came to realise how seductive power was as a key lieutenant of Sergeant Doe, and the conviction that if he could benefit so much as a Doe soldier on the periphery, played a great role in sparking him to wage war for the sole purpose of commanding power and therefore the resources.  He could take it all from the naïve and illiterate soldiers who did not know the full dimension of power and what its unlimited opportunities are. The emergence as  role models men and women flaunting power, and immensely benefiting from it, is a curse to the rise of a generation believing in discipline and professional pursuits as honourable means to make respectable living because society no longer counts respect and honour, only those who wield power.

This fanaticism with power leads to decay in professional areas so vital for national development. A man with a PhD, meaning he is research- prepared for the classroom to mould minds for a better tomorrow, settles for a post as a director in which he is not required to be productive or creative, but only to exercise power over his preys and therefore get more crude economic benefits than if he were before a class.  A journalist, trained, finds it demeaning working as a professional journalist and rewarding preparing press releases or shouting on the BBC for the president. A medical doctor sees more self-fulfilment as a minister, a position in which he exercises power, than saving lives.

The aura of power, the knowledge that one has the right of life and death over others, can be entrapping. Thus US-based politician and presidential candidate Dr. George Klay Kieh, who teaches political science in the US, can best be understood when he vows that if he wins power in the 2005 elections, he will carefully select his opponents and subject them to “revolutionary violence” by underlining the corrupting nature of power. The power to distinguish what is “revolutionary violence” and “predatory violence”, in Mr. Kieh’s words, says how intoxicating power can be for those who desire it.

Without a dramatic shift in perceptions, which entails, amongst others, depriving the insane and the mediocre of power, the dream of peace, and within it economic development, will remain illusive, particularly in a society that boasts of more incompetents than at any other time. Such people, unable to think, and to be creative, fall on power, the easiest tool that conceals all personal failures. Soyinka’s diagnosis is refreshing on the dimensions of power for the sane who want to take a distance from power.