Liberia: A Clarion Call to the Citizens of Cape Mount to Redeem the County
By By Alfred P.B. Kiadii
Cape Mount will be written off, as the result of the elevation of slavish flunkies and parasitic imbeciles, who are poised to serve as the new leaders of the county. Such asymmetrical power structure will eventually lead the county down the slope of decadence, leaving the people to wallow in despair. This will stifle growth, sap the resilience of the people, and keep the county in the state of backwardness.
In an epoch of global competitiveness when progressive societies are tapping on the expertise of the savvy and brightest to lead the task for transformation, Cape Mount has been cursed with a degenerate leadership which will kill every vitality left in the county. Our county has been plagued with a leadership which is lacking in every iota of competence and consciousness to lead the charge for a progressive future in which the county will situate itself at the apex of indices of national comparison of social indicators. This Reverse gear which has been activated will increase poverty levels, widen inequality, worsen the standard of living, and increase the death toll of the citizens by curable diseases.
Our Superintendent-designate in Aaron Vincent is a junior high school degenerate who abandoned school when he was in the ninth grade. As for the Assistant Superintendent for Development-designate in Boima G. Kamara, he is not only an elementary school dropout and terminal psychopath but also a serial killer whose past of savage violence in the civil bloodletting of Liberia relapses relations of his victims into traumatic disorder each time they see him walking scot-free. In addition, this pathetic scoundrel of the first order with a sordid human rights record headed a dreadful death squad which dismembered pregnant women, ignited arson attacks, slaughtered peaceful citizens in cold blood, and unleashed an onslaught of terror on the people of the county in particular and Liberians in general.
Again, the synecdochic relationship which echoes that the part represents the whole and vice-versa is instructive here when one looks at the national makeup of the moribund power structure of the state. For the enlightened vanguard, it is no surprise as we predicted that the political farce which was thrust on us by the bandit Jerome Kokoyah through the dastard manipulation of former President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and her monstrous cabal of vitriolic plunderers will replicate itself across the landscape of the republic. If the top of the country has a nonentity what more about constituent parts of it? This is instructive in understanding the degeneracy which has dogged the country.
Cape Mount is now a scandalous scar on the conscience of the republic. It has been ripped-off— expect it to remain embroiled in the inertia of backwardness. Due to the fact that this reactionary leadership doesn’t have the foresight and intelligence to run the bureaucracy of the county, let alone the clairvoyance to roll out the social transformation. The sad truth is that why other counties may make a quantum leap in the right direction expect ours to be in perpetual stasis, as the new leadership is found wanting.
At best the new leadership of Cape Mount is like a cesspool of garbage on a rubbish dump. This is a national humiliation which leaves me wailing in the wilderness. I cannot fathom why my beloved county is being downgraded to drunk status in such an egregious faction. It is a pity that my helpless optimism about it rising above the current frailties have been dealt a mortal blow, from which it might not recover in the short term except something dramatic happens to overturn the status quo.
The farce is loathsome at a time when one takes into consideration the challenges the county is confronted with. It saddens this writer that a county so rich in talents and patriotic citizens have been given a poisoned chalice of a leadership to consume. This in itself unmasks the bankruptcy of the feudal monarch who resides in Monrovia, and further unveils the obvious indifference that the ruling clique harbors about the countryside-- a zoo where subhuman primates reside. If this is not tantamount to the elevation of toxic dummies in national leadership then I don’t know what is.
The Feudal Economic Arrangement in Kingjor Town
The feudal economic structure in Kingjor Town is where the parasitic elements of the ruling class along with their intellectual prostitutes and local flunkies defraud our county of millions and pay the working class with starvation income. This brazen cruelty has happened for the past years due to the complicity of our lawmakers, who are also benefitting from the loot.
This town in Cape Mount has one of the best genres of gold and accounts for one of the largest deposits of that precious mineral in the republic. But life seems like hell for the people residing in the town, as the New Liberty Gold Mines in that town operated by the Avesoro Resource Incorporated is yet to meet the people’s aspiration for a poverty-free environment, provide better housing facilities, schools and other necessities of life that are central to their existence.
Wages remain meager for Liberians and other citizens of Cape Mount who are working with the company, while expatriates who are brought by it to do menial jobs which Liberians can do are paid bumper salary. Such deplorable wage gap has not gone unnoticed by the conscious Liberian workers who are quite aware that their living labor is what the company uses to make a surplus profit. This has led to protest actions in which citizens and workers alike of the company demand better a living wage, as well as making demands to the company to improve its emphasis on safety, health, and sanitation in the work environment. But these demands are yet to be met due to the collusion of the state with the company.
Avesoro Resource Incorporated makes million from the county while the people’s demand for a living wage is being overlooked. Conservative estimate puts the figure from the sale of gold by Avesoro at four million United States dollars a month. Another independent estimate puts the figure at a staggering six million United States dollars a month. Yet the people of the town lives are in tatters. Yet the people of the town, not to mention the entire county, don’t have access to basic social services and modern housing facilities.
According to IRIN news agency, in March 2016, the Avesoro Resource Incorporated contaminated waterways with ‘an accident at New Liberty Gold mine released cyanide and arsenic, byproducts of the mining process, into a nearby river that serves villages downstream. In Jikando, where people use its water to fish, bath and wash clothes, they began to see dead fish floating. Soon, they started developing skin rashes themselves.’ Yet no medical test has been conducted on villagers who reported such medical problem.
The workers knowing that the interests of the capitalists and the interests of the workers have not been one and the same have protested for higher wages, better work environment, but the ruling class and their accomplices of local lackeys have always inflicted pains on the working class. During the last protest organized by the workers in early 2018, the police shot and rounded up peaceful workers and consigned them to dingy prison cells simply because they were demanding a living wage. Such reveals the terrible nature of capitalism-- the possessing class has always used lethal violence, masked under the instruments of the rule of law, against the non-possessing class. And the state which exercises the ‘monopoly of violence’ over the republic has been used as a weapon by the ruling class in the class struggle.
The natural resources which are deposited beneath the soil of Cape Mount are capable of transforming the lives of our people. They are sufficient to disallow children going to bed with hunger. They are enough to put our county at the apex of development in the republic. They are sufficient to ensure that the people’s children have access to free primary and secondary education. They are enough to roll out free healthcare for the generality of the people. They are enough to have free housing for the people. They are enough to transform the grim economic condition of the people. They are enough to have pipe-borne water and electricity for our people.
Will we sit in collective inertia and allow our county to rot to the core? Will we sit and fold our hands and allow such festering wound of economic gangsterism to go amok without ensuring that it falls like a house of cards? Will we insulate ourselves from the cries of our compatriots, some of whom are in martyrdom, still relishing the decisive hour when this menace which frustrates the working class’ stampede into history is expurgated from the nucleus of our county and yea the republic? Will we play indifference to such pervasive and pernicious economic sodomy?
Are there men who are not moved by the scenes of poor people, or the poverty of their compatriots? Will you spinelessly sit and watch your beloved compatriots die of curable diseases, although the county and the republic have a preponderance of natural resources to turn the tide around? Will the individuals who claim to love their county sit idle and allow it to go down the drain?
Of course, not! Forbid it! Preserve us from such terrible inaction! We should reject it! We should not be consumed by it!
We have wept for too long. We have intellectualized about this super-exploitation in our ivory tower for too long. We have also suffered from the ‘paralysis of analyses for too long. We have held dialogues with the voracious capitalists for too long. We have been asked to remain silent for too long. We have been assured that this situation will change. Yet months have come and gone; days have come and passed, but our people still live in squalid Bantustans. This divulges the terrible truth that the working class and the capitalists have never had the same agenda: the latter is more concerned about getting surplus profit even at the cost of blood and the lives of the working class, while the latter is interested in unshackling itself from the stranglehold of exploitation so that the productive forces can be organized in a way such that they control the means of production and divide the surplus profit on the basis of egalitarianism.
We must stand and fight for what rightfully belongs to us. At this moment history has not given us the luxury to play callous insensitivity when the soul of the county is pierced on the altar of oppression and crony capitalism. We should stand for once and end this scandal. We must stand up to those who think that they can continue to suppress the people of our great homeland with reckless abandon and make history of them, without being taught the decisive lessons that oppressed people have taught their exploiters in the global South.
Just as the Liberian government is complicit in this amassment of bloody capital through its fusion with foreign settlers so too is the World Bank (a major shareholder in Avesoro Resource Incorporated). The former has always defended the interests of the capitalists as opposed to the interests of the combined forces of the working class and the peasant masses, while the latter which pontificates with righteous grandstanding is stained with the blood of defenseless compatriots who have died as the result of the bestiality of the Avesoro. The World Bank has exposed itself as a fraudulent farce which is part and parcel of the exploitation of even the most backward countries in its onslaught to amass private property. This devil of a Bank, to borrow from the Leader of the Bolivarian Revolution in Comrade Hugo Chavez of blessed memory, smells of sulfur.
When the people move en masse and in stiff resistance to such economic bestiality, those who suppress us will tremble in fear. We have nothing to lose but everything to gain. The dire need to redeem Cape Mount is now and cannot be postponed. It is a historical mission that we must not neglect, as history has no place for weaklings.
We must now unite under the insignia of economic emancipation in our lifetime. Forget about whether an individual is a Vai, Gola or Mende. In history, the struggle has never been about tribe but class. Lest we forget, the ruling class has always used tribal or sectional bigotry to divert our attention from the core issues. The Vai, Gola, and Mende peoples have been exploited. So the Vai, Gola, and Mende people must unite to overthrow this system of super-exploitation. Liberating the workers from the inferno of economic barbarity supersedes tribal or sectional infighting. When we unite in one accord, our adversaries will tremble in fears. Lest we forget, in unity, there is a strength.
At this stage, we cannot afford to discriminate. Division on tribal or sectional line is a form of bourgeois nationalism, which the oppressors use to frustrate the effort of the working class for self-determination. When we get divided into such false dichotomy, the elements of reaction will use their sterile tactic of divide and rule to kill the aspiration of the workers to attain economic emancipation.
For our compatriots who are comprador bourgeoisie (individuals who serve as agents for foreign interests or capital), we have to liberate them from mental slavery. If you like, call it the decolonization of the minds. We must do this so they can join us in trumpeting the collective agenda of the county. In this, we need all the forces to coalesce under a homogenous banner.
I must say to all and sundry that we either unite and fight in unison or perish in the division. We have nothing to lose but everything to gain. The contradiction arising from the organization of the productive forces in Cape Mount and the republic is not due to the fact that a few continue to enslave the workers, but it is an expression of the bestiality of the capitalist system of production. Now is the time to unshackle ourselves from the stranglehold of oppression. The ruling class and their parasitic collaborators have everything to lose. We have everything to gain. We must fight until this system is overthrown!
About the Author: Kiadii studies Political Science with an emphasis in Public Administration at the University of Liberia. He is a social and political critic and the Secretary-General of the Movement for Social Democratic Alternative (MOSODA). He can be reached on Cell +233552176627 and bokiadii@gmail.com.