analysis

30 May 04

The saying that every country deserves the type of leaders it gets is the kind of wisdom hard to contest. Liberia, after years of horrors with competing crooks in command of the country, will get the type of leaders it deserves in 2005. This will then determine whether more people will perish, more properties are destroyed, or peace will be restored for the ordinary man to consolidate the gains of the UN administered peace prevailing.

Nine months are sufficient to determine the quality and the agenda of a political grouping. What can be said about Liberia under the acclaimed businessman Charles Gyude Bryant is that it is now business as usual he promised would never be. But without the UN as a cushion for business as usual, he would have been a done deal—a thing of the past amongst power-hungry rebels. But then the same could have been said Dr. Amos Claudius Sawyer and the successive interim regimes that came after him. Without ECOMOG the Nigerian-led West African force, they would have not survived a daylonger.

Bryant and his entourage are having a great time. Since the UN began deployment in rural areas, where humanitarian crisis has been described as terrible in some cases, the interim leader has not seen it fit to tour the areas for confidence-building and inspiration in a demoralised and ruined country. He prefers to return “home” periodically, a place his predecessor described Charles Taylor described as his ”Motherland.”

Bryant and his pals are again in the US this week, barely 4 months when they were there for a more lofty cause—seeking international assistance for sorry Liberia. The exact reason for Mr. Bryant the Businessman’s visit to the US is not known, but sources say he is there to attend the high school graduation of his son. A good father, indeed. The question is, who pays for his visit and for the array of officials accompanying him on this Safari?

Sources say some of the advanced team officials, such as the lawyer and presidential candidate Varney Sherman, are already launching their 2005 campaigns while accompanying the “chief”, all in blunt defiance of the National Elections Commission against premature campaigning. If so, isn’t this a conflict of interest? Why use a government trip to for personal political dividends? And would Bryant, as a peddler for used earth-moving equipment during the Charles Taylor regime, have made the same trip with the same hangers-on costing the poor refugees millions of dollars? Other sources say Bryant will attend the UN. If so, another question is, what would he achieve with his presence costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that he would not if he had stayed home to look after his refugee nation?

Isn’t this the man who took the stage with the slogan his “will not be business as usual”? But then emerging from Charles Taylor’s years of naked terror and at least honest armed robbery, many may be concluding that Bryant is bad, but not evil. The problem is that no one is born evil. Conditions, particularly in politics, can transform a good person into an evil person and Bryant, by his callousness, is a candidate for evil. By siphoning money from badly needed projects such as renovating schools, paying teachers, fixing hospitals, etc for a US Safari every three months, one is indirectly or directly endorsing evil and therefore death of the innocents.

That these trips are taken every month by government officials in one form or another is also understandable. With salaries of ministers standing at barely $US40, some excuse must be discovered to help them make ends meet. This has been the system over the decades, particularly since the war when the Liberian dollar became useless as prices climbed. Thus every official coins a trip as an excuse to siphon some US dollars, because one-day per diem is equivalent to years of earned salary. Apart from kickbacks from Lebanese and others, along with bribes for every service rendered, foreign trips are the prime income earners.

For now, Bryant shines because of two main reasons: The UN safety-valve of security which allows him and his pals to play with the little money coming in, and the looming evil of Charles Taylor that reminds Liberians every second of the alternative. The fact that Monrovia now has a Police 911 number, through which residents can alert the Police to save them from armed robbers, the new label for rebels, gives him a whitewash. At least not many people are being dragged out of their homes and shot with the government promising never conducted investigation. Not yet. But the determination to keep enjoying can transform many into beasts of self-preservation. Whether the landscape presenting Bryant as better than Taylor is the result of UNMIL or Bryant and his happy-go-lucky pals’ desire for peace beclouds the fact. Bryant takes credit. He is head of state. Come 2005, if he succeeds in implanting a clone like the lawyer and mentor Varnney Sherman, Liberians will deserve a leader they deserve—bad but not evil as time determines.