PYJ to visit Doe’s home

Senator Prince Yormie Johnson is embarking on a journey that some may say is aimed at digging old wounds, at least so they think, as he has announced plan to visit the home of slain Liberian President Samuel Kanyon Doe in Grand Gedeh County in a planned tour of southeast Liberia. 

He is political leader of the opposition party Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction or MDR and the planned tour to the southeast is expected to be largely dominated by politics. Johnson’s dreaded Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia or INPFL rebels captured and subsequently butchered President Doe in September 1990 at the Freeport of Monrovia where the slain President had gone to meet with peacekeeping troops during the peak of the Liberian Civil War.

e told reporters in Ganta, Nimba County over the weekend that before the 2017 elections, he will visit the southeast of the country to talk with voters, specifically the home town of slain President Doe in Grand Gedeh County.

Speaking in Ganta, the MDR leader said the planned visit is in response to recent support he allegedly received from citizens when his photograph entered that region. “I was impressed to hear that citizens in the southeast were fighting over my photo that appeared in the area”, said the ex-Presidential candidate.

The pending visit by the leader of the disbanded INPFL rebels to the southeast will be the first after that eventful moment in 1990 when rebel forces under his command killed all guards that accompanied the President and took him captive before torturing him to death and putting his dead body on public display subsequently at the Island Clinic on Bushrod Island.

Senator Johnson, who was poorly received in Ganta unlike his previous visits, did not specifically state when he plans to visit Tuzon, Grand Gedeh, home of the slain President.
Hundreds of his supporters in Nimba, including members of the business community headed by Mr. PharazeDekpah recently pledged loyalty to the candidacy of Vice President Joseph Boakai in the 2017 elections.

Mr. Dekpah told The NewDawntheir decision to support Boakai is based on the fact that the Vice President is corruption-free and maintains an impeccable public service record in Liberia According to him, they are willing to financially support the candidacy of Vice President Boakai, if the need arises.

The recent crossover of several Johnson’s supporters to the Boakai Movement has sent a big blow to his quest to vie for the nation’s highest office for the second time. He contested in the 2011 polls, coming third after President Sirleaf and Cllr. Winston A. Tubman of the Congress for Democratic Change, but gave his support to Madam Sirleaf in the runoff.

Some supporters said the only thing Senator Johnson could brag of toNimbaians is that he killed President Doe under whose regime they suffered ethnic cleansing as a result of countless allegations of involvement in coup plot. According to some Nimba residents, while all other lawmakers have gone to their respective counties to be with their people during the agriculture break, Senator PYJ only spent three days

n Ganta City and left for Monrovia. “Like him go to Monrovia because it is Monrovia that elected him as Senator for Nimba, but 2017 is coming we will see who have the power”, they added.

By Franklin Doloquee, Nimba-Editing by Jonathan Browne