By: Togba-Nah Tipoteh
The key to the partisan campaign strategy of the new government was to get on the ground running by not repeating the same mistakes and not doing business as usual. In order to stop the repeating of past mistakes and doing business as usual, this Commentary comes forth to help in stopping and preventing the repeating of past mistakes and the doing of business as usual.
The best way to implement the stopping, prevention and doing business as usual is to help the people to understand their rights as found in the Constitution Liberia. So we turn to Chapter I Article 8 of the Constitution of Liberia. There, we find the following: “The Republic shall direct its policy towards, ensuring for all citizens, without discrimination, opportunities for employment and livelihood under just and humane conditions, and towards safety, health and welfare facilities for employment”.
Since the nineteen fifties, when reliable data became available, it has been known that during that time the Liberian economy exhibited the second highest growth rate per person in the world with a few Liberians having access to over sixty per cent of Liberia’s income and wealth while the rest of the people of Liberia were living in poverty. This poverty generation situation has come to be known as economic growth without economic development or growth without development for short (Robert Clower, et al, Growth Without Development, Northwestern University Press, 1966). Now, National Legislators have access to LD200,000 a day and their foreign partners have access to LD300,000,000 a day while the rest of the people of Liberia have access to at most less than LD400 a day (Annual Reports of the CBL. LISGIS, MFDP, MCI, WB, IMF, ADB and UNDP).
Although it is locally and globally known that economic growth does not necessarily mean economic development, the sustained improvement in the people’s living conditions, the government of Liberia continues to operate the Liberian economy on the basis that economic growth means economic development. All of the international partners of the government of Liberia, up to less than a week ago, continue to promote the growth means development syndrome in Liberia.
The people of Liberia have concluded that Liberia is headed in the wrong direction (Afrobarometer, 2022). Therefore, the people who love Liberia are working on transforming the prevailing unfair electoral system to the enduring fair electoral system through the Rule of Law. This process is working well, as seen in the non-re-election of over seventy -five per cent of the Legislators of the 52nd, 53rd and 54th National Legislatures of Liberia. This trend is highly likely to continue in the ensuing elections. It is only through this transformation that persons with good records can get elected to bring in the system of Justice, the ingredient for Peace and Progress in Liberia and in any other country.
