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Editorial

The sad news coming out of Robertsport

President George Manneh Weah and his entourage were not only surprised, but clearly disappointed when local authorities in Robertsports, Grand Cape Mount County could not host the President and his official delegation due to lack of infrastructure as they ended a three-county tour to Western Liberia on Saturday, 27 March. It is hardly believable that Robertsport, a very histroric city, does not have official guest house to host the President of Liberia and members of his party on an official visit.

President Weah was constrained to stay at Nana’s Louge, a private faciity in Robertsport during his tour of the county where he held town hall meetings with Cape Mountaineers. The tour to Werstern Liberia that took President Weah and his official derlegation to Bomi, Gbarpolu and Grand Cape Mount counites respectively was the second leg of a nationwide tour that began in Febrauary in Central and Southeastern Liberia.

“Do we have lawmakers in this county”, the President asked, and continued, :If there is any lawmaker in this county that did not invest in hotel or invest in his own house that when leaders come here they will host them, then they are the problem…you re the Representation or Representative of people and where you live, you can’t develop the place for attraction?”

President Weah: “look into our government, we have men and women who are from Robertsport. If I make a list of those offricials from Robertsport that are in the government…if they cannot improve this county then they don’t have to blame the government.”

Renowned Liberian corporate lawyer Varney G. Sherman is Senator of Grand Cape Mount County, but has no structure in the county that he represents to host the President and entourage. Instead, Sen. Sherman, who formed part of President Weah’s tour to the county recentrly, went on bending knees during the town hall meeting and implored the President to help construct an official guest house in Cape Mount that would host guests from Monrovia and elsewhere.

But Varney Sherman is completing two-nine year terms in the Liberian Senate, and he has failed to look back in terms of development to the county he represents along with his colleagues, first beginning with the late Sen. Edward Dagoseh, and his successor Victor Watson, who lost the seat last year to Simeon Taylor, but is challenging the poll result. Besides, Grand Cape Mount has about three other lawmakers in the House of Representatives. And like all other counties in the Republic of Liberia, it had benefited County Dervelopment Funds over the years from the previous adiminstration of ex-president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

So, the million dollar question that President Weah asked in the town hall meeting was, what happend to the CDF? He challenged the entire leadership of the county to return to the drawing board in order to restore digity to that area. How can a county received millions over the past 12 years plus and does not have a presidential guest house? It’s too sad.

Robertsport, endowed with so much tourist attractions, is a town in western Liberia, about 10 miles from the Sierra Leone border. It is named after Liberia’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts. The town lies on Cape Mount peninsula, a spit of land separating the brackish lagoon Lake Piso from the Atlantic Ocean. It serves as the capital of Grand Cape Mount County. The town used to host the Tubman Center of African Culture, which was built in 1964 to commemorate William V.S. Tubman’s sixty-ninth birthday. The institution was meant to be a world-wide center of research, and to support and promote African studies, writes Wikipedia, but the Liberian civil war destroyed the structure, and only the ruins remain.

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Depite its huge potetial for revenue generation, the town virtually lies necked and neglected. The visit by President George Manneh Weah to Grand Cape Mount County is a wake up call to leaders of the county to do more in projecting a good image of the area.

Senator Varney Sherman and his colleagues in the Liberian Legislatrure who hail from Cape Mount should be honest to themselves and know that they owe it to their people, who elected them to bring proud to that beautiful county and by extension, Liberia by channeling county resources to development rather than crying baby.

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