The Pro-Poor Policy Just Got Some Meaning

Analysis by Sherman C. Seequeh
Contributing Writer

President George Forky Klon Jlaleh Gbah Ku GbehTarpeh Manneh Weah

Until the official framework of the current administration’s well-sung “pro-poor governance policy” can come out of the belly of ongoing retreats and PowerPoint deliberations, practical actions are the only prism upon which the merits of the policy and the insincerity of its proponents can be measured. Nothing is less than this. Not even the volume of the expected Pro-Poor Strategy Paper or the ecstasy generated by its literary renditions can substitute for deliberate practical revolutionary pronouncements and follow-up actions from President George Manneh Weah and his administration. Liberians have had enough rhetoric expressed in volumes of honeyed development plans that could hardly stand the test of enforceable austerity measures, particularly beginning with the proponents themselves. Many political administrations and their development agendas placed the burdens of austerity policies on others, including foreign investments and the very masses of the people, while grossing on the hurts of their own accruements.

President George Manneh Weah has broken the circus. He flaunts his chest and the chests of his appointed officials to the bullets of a major economic austerity action of Government. Back in January, he waved a substantial percentage of his own salary, leaving it with Government to decide how it would be used. This week, he has included some 4,140 officials of the Executive Branch of Government earning above US$1,000. On the average, when each of the target officials sheds at least US$100—and including ten percent from individuals earning up to the ceiling US$10,000—the government will save more than US$410,000 monthly. Considering this waiver over a year period, one finds that the Executive Branch alone will spare state coffer nearly US$5m. Let the Mathematician spread it over the first six years and include other Branches of government in case they also think pro-poor and surrender to cuts; that would be a colossal shock absorber for the national budget.

This is a rare revolutionary action on the part of President Weah; a rare action because all that Liberia’s budget history, which has proven a complete nightmare, has taught its citizens is always the accelerated upward mobility of salaries and benefits particularly for bigwigs in Government rather than in downward movement. All we have seen, which we particularly saw in the last 12 years, was the clamor and competition for a spiraled increase of emoluments amongst public functionaries, some officials setting out for themselves nonstop annual salary rise regime that some of them hit US$20,000 per month. I am very sure if President Weah had not checked the breaks on the pace—if he had come to public governance rooted in the longtime psyche that sees public service as a lottery jamboree—a single Liberia public official would earn up to US$40,000 by the end of his first tenure. Thank God the President did not only check the breaks, he has put the gear in rapid deceleration. That is quite radically groundbreaking; isn’t it?

This is what is most needed—and expected for this administration: at all levels of governance, breaking from business as usual, demolishing the old order, radically shattering the archaic bureaucracy, and turning the paradigm 150-degree shift—all for the poor, by the poor and of the poor. This is what attracts many of us to the CDC revolution.

And nothing better defines “pro-poor” and serves the purpose of institutionalizing and actualizing the pro-poor strategy than jerking public money from wherever it is misplaced, including overblown salaries and benefits. Why? Because whoever claims to be poor-people-centered, which is the other way to call pro-poor, must not be stingy. The nature of a pro-poor person is the ability to dip into his or her meager and hard-earned entitlement and share with the needy. Not many members of the ruling elite are given to the trait of selflessness and altruism. Yes, it is bureaucratic and governmental for one to use the wealth or the resources of the state to better the condition of its citizens. But there is a difference that comes with the pro-poor context, where one uses or lets out his own earnings to better the condition of the downtrodden. By imposing his innate altruistic nature on his appointees, President Weah is teaching his followers and appointees the most notable and intrinsic meaning of the pro-poor agenda—sharing personal goodies with the underprivileged. He’s saying in effect that changing the story of the poor people of Liberia is not only going to be done from taxes from business people and grants and loans paid by domestic and foreign sources; it will be done also from the pockets of individuals who are paid to serve the public interest. He’s saying, “To whom much is given much much is expected.” In other words, the President is saying, it should not take a huge salary or benefit for public servants to serve the Liberian people better. If at all service is what actually attracts his officials in Government, President Weah is teaching that all and sundry in Government must be prepared to forget that mentality or find somewhere else to go and serve, not in his Government.

By mustering the rare courage to cut salaries, George Weah has in a sense not only put a new definition on public service, he has also declared a major war on one of his pro-poor agenda’s archenemy—lavish compensations in Government. And for the singular act of radically slashing salaries and benefits, the President must be ready to stand in a covert battle with vicious “public moguls”—officials who are innately mean, who are anti-poor, who are used to pocketing loose cash, and who think public service is a casino. These fiscal miscreants and kleptocrats will not resign nor will they make known their dissatisfactions public in the face of the President’s salary-cut action. They will rather keep hanging on the public service but inclined to use devious techniques to cultivate subtle but cruel alternatives to acquit for the lost portions of their earnings which the President so necessarily has preyed upon. This means, while the masses might rightfully be celebrating the austerity action on salaries of public officials, it is just not the end of it all. In fact, the war has just started and President Weah and his true pro-poor lieutenants must get ready to keep alert and surveillance on aggrieved public officials who will definitely strive to find recuperation of their lost earnings from dubious deeds. If they were not satisfied with emoluments such as US$10,000, US$15,000 and even US$20,000 per month, what will the ceiling of US$7,800 do for these economic vampires? Thus, any attempt by President Weah to limit his recent salary slash to budgetization and play cool on the need to clip the wings of scoundrels once and for all, the nation will witness the spiraled upsurge of heightened fiscal misdeeds as ever seen in the corruption history of the country. For there are elements finding means to recuperate from the sting of the just-announced austerity action.

Some areas to keep a ready alert on are the areas of procurement and employment. Shady contracts with private service providers, procurement of office supplies, including automobiles, payroll padding are all easy cushions to give affected and dissatisfied public officials recovery from the reduction of their salaries and benefits. If the Internal Audit Agency, the General Auditing Commission and Public Procurement and Concession Commission have ever intended to do better in their various integrity wars against waste and pillage, this is the time—the time at which public officials, for the first time in history, are given a significant hit on their legal earnings. Many would want to go wild and cruel.

On the overall, however, the emerging popular catchphrase of “Pro-Poor Governance Agenda” has now found its root meaning and innate relevance in the pronouncement addressing the issue of mammoth salaries and benefits, an issue which has not only been a source of lingering public outcry long ignored but also which constitutes an inhibitive factor towards socioeconomic justice and Liberia’s development and progress. The Government and those who believe in it must run with this singular austerity action which unarguably is a historic, unprecedented governance policy. No one needs a voluminous development strategy to grasp this fact.