The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
March 6, 2021

Dr. Togba-Nah Tipoteh

When anybody who must see clearly, travels around Liberia today, what does he or she see? He or she sees that nearly all the people are catching hard times. Some people do not have food to eat, and most people do not have good food to eat. Some people do not have land to grow food, while some people do not have enough land to grow food for themselves and have some leftover to sell to get things that they do not produce or send their children to school.

Are the hard times that the people are catching now new? No, the hard times catching the people is nothing new. These hard times have been catching people for centuries. We remembered the Slave Trade over five hundred years ago when greedy local rulers sold people as slaves to greedy foreign slave buyers. We remember how powerful nations took poor people’s land by force. We remember how greedy local rulers used the Hut Tax to take land from the poor people, making them poorer. We remember how powerful international companies supported greedy local rulers to be elected through a bad electoral system so that they could promote the production of raw materials for export. The local rulers were schooled to copy the values of the company owners by producing what the people do not consume and consuming what the people do not produce.

It is the foreign domination with national decision-makers of poor countries, like Liberia, that leads to poverty generation rather than poverty alleviation. The greedy decision-makers try to cover their actions by using fancy slogans to try to fool the people into thinking that the societal situation is getting better. But the people who have eyes to see clan see clearly that the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. These facts about poverty generation can be seen from the data of the 1950s when Liberia had the highest per-person economic growth rate in the world while less than one percent of Liberians were having access to more than sixty percent of Liberia’s income and wealth. This reality is called Growth Without Economic Development or Growth Without Development for short. The national decision-makers refer to big buildings, fancy vehicles, and paved roads as development. The people are in tears crying out loud: “That big buildings, fancy cars and paved roads we will eat”. By producing what we do not eat and eating what we do not produce, we learn to do the things that benefit the international companies and the national decision-makers at the expense of the poor who continue to experience massive unemployment of over eighty percent with nearly all Liberians remaining poor, having access to less than US $2 a day while legislators have access to US $1,000 a day and foreigners in the commercial sector have access to US $2 million a day.

This poverty generation situation is, in fact, violence-oriented because the poor become very frustrated and are misused by the greedier rich to engage in violence from State power through coup d’etats and civil wars. In other cases, the greedier rich use the poverty situation as a pretext to facilitate the existence of a bad electoral system through which bad persons can get elected to sustain the poverty generation situation.

Seeing what the greedier rich do, some poor people working within their communities use the Rule of Law to promote poverty alleviation. Witness the case of the people of Putu, Grand Gedeh County in the Southeast, the poorest part of Liberia. The Putu people with the help of Susukuu, the Poverty Alleviation NGO, formed the Putu Development Corporation (PUDECO), which took the government of Liberia to Court when the government tried to prevent the people from taking control of their local economy dominated by foreign loggers. High awareness among the Putuans in Monrovia motivated societal nonviolent action that led to the Putu people defeating the government in the Grand Gedeh Court. Now, the Powers That Be are trying to take over the iron ore area in Putu without the consent of the Putu people. No wonder, the poor continue to get poorer while the rich get richer! The same situation happened in Grand Cape Mount County when concessions took over the land without the approval of the people and the people protested, resulting in the Head of State going there to apologize to the people. But the problem of foreign domination remains.

What then is the Way Forward for The Better? The Way Forward For The Better is for the people who love Liberia to work together and use knowledge to raise awareness in ways that motivate the people to take non-violent action through the Rule of Law to end Poverty Generation and bring in Poverty Alleviation by changing the bad electoral system into a good electoral system in which good persons can get elected. In this way, the hard times change into soft times, meaning that bad times change into good times.

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