Veteran Politician Survives Mysterious Attack

A veteran Liberian politician Oscar Jaryee Quiah, has reportedly survived a “home plot” which took him near death before being rescued by a team of medical doctors from the Jackson Fiah Doe Memorial Hospital in Tappita, Nimba County.

Quiah, 71, was airlifted from Monrovia while in critical condition to Tappita where he underwent a successful surgery fortnight ago. It is not known what really went wrong, but family sources told this paper that the prominent politician is said to have been bitten by an unknown insect recently, while sitting underneath a palaver hut in his compound in Gardnerville.

When this happened, the sources said: “Quiah immediately developed a swollen right leg, which worsened to an extent that his leg became bigger than an elephant foot thus, becoming incapacitated in the lower limb.

“We tried as much we [could] but to no avail to the point that we were losing him to death before these medical doctors were called in to save his life and had it not been for them (doctors), he would have been the next prominent figure to have followed Michael Francis,” the sources said.

Some family members attributed the unknown insect bite to an “African science or witch-craft” activity against the one time councilman of the defunct five-man collective presidency under the late Professor Wilton Sankawulo during the transitional period in 1995. Almost three years ago, Quiah survived a nasty motor accident on the Monrovia-Robertfield highway in which nobody thought he would have survived.

For more than 15 years now, Jaryee, who once served as the first Minister of Local Government (now Internal Affairs) in the early 80s right from the Monrovia Central Prison, has been out of public life due to continuous ill health.

He served in various public posts, including director general of the Civil Service Agency, Managing Director of the Liberia Telecommunications Corporation and Minister of Local Government, amongst others.

Quiah is one of the founding members of the Progressive Alliance of Liberia or PAL which metamorphosed into the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) and the United People’s Party (UPP). He and others made the sacrifices for the present atmosphere of multi-party democracy in Liberia, reports TKS.