One Year Older, One Year Wiser? – Give Meaning To 163rd Independence

07/24/2010 - FPA EDITORIAL
Source: FrontPage Africa

LIBERIA TURNS 163 years old on Monday, July 26, the celebrations this year is taking on new meaning with a number of development infrastructures being unveiled by the post-war government .

FOR DECADES, Africa’s oldest republic have struggled to maintain peace and stability. Years of war, chaos and hardship shattered the economic and political life of a nation once seen as one of the most peaceful nations in the world.

ALL THAT CHANGED on April 12, 1980 when a band of lowly-ranked officers of the Armed Forces of Liberia staged a coup d’etat that ended decades of Americo-Liberian rule.

THE HISTORY of the last 163 years have been filled with drama, one-party dominance, chaos and war, assassinations, coup attempts and a host of other events which at one point or another left a dark spot in the archives of Liberia’s history.

BETWEEN 1923 AND 1930, the League of Nations investigated the transportation of migrant labor between Liberia and the Spanish colony of Fernando Po. Although the League concentrated its attention on Liberia, a closer examination revealed labor abuse as the product of conditions on Fernando Po. In the last quarter of the 19th century, black planters on the island had shifted from palm oil trading to cocoa cultivation. Their dependence on migrant labor and increasing competition with Europeans resulted in an economic crisis in the first years of the twentieth century. Planters detained labor but failed to pay contracts, resulting in a situation akin to slavery.

THE STORY OF Edward James Roye, the first pure black person to become President of Liberia, for example marked the beginning of numerous turbulent times for Liberia. Roye arrived as a new immigrant in 1846, one year before Independence was proclaimed and became President in 1870 but was deposed the following year in the first coup d’état. He died a mysterious death in Monrovia in early 1872.

YEARS LATER, Liberia would enter the history books for holding the most fraudulent elections in world history when Charles.D.B.King Of Liberia Won The Presidential Elections Of 1927 By A Margin Of 234,000 Votes And Was Duly Elected. King won the presidential elections held in 1927 as a member of the 'True Whig Party'. He has from then on lived on in infamy not because of his landslide victory but because of large scale election fraud—in fact the most fraudulent election ever reported in the world's history as per the Guinness Book of World Records (1982). In Liberia at that time, there were only 15,000 eligible voters as the constitution had limited suffrage to 15,000 citizens. The election results declared an election win by a margin of nearly 240,000 votes.

YEARS LATER, in 1985, Samuel Kanyon Doe, who had seized power by the gun won another questionable elections which was followed by a coup atttempt led by Thomas Quiwonkpa. Doe and Quiwonkpa, one of the original seventeen coup leaders, had fallen out and Quiwonkpa went into exile to the United States, and many of his supporters, mainly, decommissioned security personnel, took refuge in neighboring Cote d'Ivoire where they began training to engage the Doe dictatorship.

THE 1985 ELECTIONS featured five different political parties, with televised debates involving all five candidates. The 1985 election commission said President Doe got 51 percent of the vote, and the opposition shared the remaining 49 percent. But many observers charged that President Doe stole the 1985 presidential election. The elections were characterized by widespread fraud and rigging.

On November 12, 1985, former Army Commanding Gen. Thomas Quiwonkpa invaded Liberia by way of neighboring Sierra Leone. Quiwonkpa almost succeeded in toppling the government of Samuel Doe. Members of the Krahn-dominated Armed Forces of Liberia repelled Quiwonkpa's attack and executed him in Monrovia. Edward Slanger, at the head of a group of AFL soldiers, claimed on television that they captured and killed Thomas Quiwonkpa. They paraded his body parts around Monrovia in a grisly ritual that Liberians will remember for years. Others were put on trial, and many were summarily executed.

THE COUP OF 1980 was preceded by a rice riots which from all indications showed the writings on the wall of what was to come. Doe’s rule lasted nine years and the bulk of Liberia’s bigger troubles emerged on the eve of Christmas in 1989 when Charles Taylor led his forces by way of Nimba.

IRONICALLY, THIS YEAR’S celebration returns to the scene of the crime as the post-war nation looks to lay the ghosts of yesteryears to rest. As we celebrate this year, let us all be mindful of from where we have come and where we are about to journey to.

IN RECENT WEEKS, MONTHS AND EVEN DAYS, several incidents appear to suggest that Liberia and Liberians have still not learned from their rugged past. Corruption which led to the 1980 coup is still a major problem and reconciliation is still miles away for many. A case in point is the reluctance of the Ministry of Finance to pay commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and numerous new cases of corruption in the post-war government.

TOO MANY LIVES have been lost and too many bridges broken along the way. We hope that for the sake of peace, the memory of the last 163 years would serve as a reminder to all as we celebrate this year, keeping in mind the negatives of the past and doing all we can to ensure that those ugly years are never repeated again in our history.