By Naneka A. Hoffman
The University of Liberia’s campus-based Student Unification Party (SUP) says it will protest the pending July 26 Independence Day celebration by the government, in the face of extreme hardship, despicable suffering and sordid social decadence in the country.
SUP discloses plan to stage a “fix the country” campaign on July 26, 2022, that would lead to Nationwide protest against the government for economic failure, massive corruption, and bad governance, among others.
In a statement here Monday, July 18, 2022, SUP Chairman Mustapha N. Kanneh noted that
in a country where people are dying of curable sicknesses and hospitals are shut down due to poor support, independence celebration is useless
Liberia which declared independence on July 26, 1847, under the watch of free slaves from America, turns 175 next Tuesday, July 26. Already, the Government of Liberia is gearing up for an official celebration.
But the student party says the last five years of the Weah administration have been very turbulent and tumultuous for the Liberian people, as discontent, hopelessness and frustration have overwhelmed them due to poor leadership.
Chairman Kanneth continues that independence celebration is meaningless in a society where the average citizen finds it difficult to afford daily meals and parents cannot afford to keep their children in school because either they lack job opportunities, or they are paid chicken change.
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He laments that Liberia is in a hemorrhaging tornado of crisis, adding “There is a general degeneration and sporadic breakdown of the Liberian state.”
According to him, governance of the State is now taken for wild child’s-play, as President Weah and his cohorts distribute the national resources amongst themselves, while the countryside bleeds, with citizens sleeping in darkness under odious circumstances, struggling to survive and to see the next day.
“Under these difficult circumstances”, he notes; “some young people have either dropped out of school or abandoned school to toil for economic survival.”
SUP observes that today in Liberia, more children are selling in the streets than they were before 2018, and that many more kids are missing basic primary and secondary education due to high
cost of living, while government endlessly harmonizes civil servants’ salaries.
“Dependency is growing. Poverty is multiplying and hunger has reached an unprecedented height. [President] George Weah has consigned a once thriving republic to the pit of acrimonious destitution- a trilogy of everything bad.”
SUP points to misappropriation of over US$ 24.8 million from the National Road
Fund by Finance Minister Samuel Tweah, looting of National Census Fund by LISGIS officials as indicted by the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission June 2022 report, criminal maneuvering at the Ministry of Agriculture under the watch of Minister Jennie Cooper, as indicted by the LACC June 2022 report, and the mysterious death of Princess Cooper, Emmanuel Cooper, including three (3) missing boys involved in the St. Moses saga, as well as secret killings of more than three (3) auditors and all other victims without proper investigation by the police and justice by the state, as some vices of the government that has brought its governance of the State under question. Editing by Jonathan Browne
