An opinion by Moses Uneh Yahmia
West Point exemplifies Liberia’s harsh economic and social reality – poverty, neglect, social malaise, etc. Despite these impediments to human progress, the people continue to demonstrate resilience and have refused to be erased. Like many of the readers here, I normally do my shopping in the Waterside Market, the Ma Juah Market, the Rally Town Market, or along the streets of Mechlin Street, Randall Street, and so on. What I see and believe you see are the masses of people, many of whom are residents of the Township of West Point, fighting to make ends meet through petite trading, street peddling, and other informal economic activities to overcome these privations.
Their daily struggle is a slap in the face to the vulgar neoliberal elites who, in their quest to restructure the state and scrap all social benefits, argue that widespread poverty among the masses is a product of idleness, indolence, and vice rather than the neoliberal capitalist reconstruction of society and the industrial burglary of the criminal political class. The Ellen government was founded on this neoliberal ideology. The issue of poverty reduction is more of individual responsibility and less of the state.
However, while the masses were left to their own devices, the state not only “banjoed” out mineral and natural resources and public utilities to multinational corporations under the guise of privatization, but the national treasury was also looted in an organized robbery scheme carried out by criminal elements, many of whom now use the stolen wealth to buy political power, while others boast of being the wealthiest Liberians, having ownership of large commercial enterprises in the private sector.
It was this utter neglect of the masses coupled with the ostentatious display of wealth by the criminal political class that created the material condition for the political relevance of Mr. Weah and the CDC. The masses, especially in popular slums such as West Point, had this illusion that Weah possessed a magic wand to change their lot; he could replicate his soccer genius in political leadership and build a glorious future for their children. Weah is from the slum.
Thus, he understood their challenges and had the vision and agenda to resolve them: according to this logic, class origin has a causal relationship with class position. So every argument against this farce was not given receptive ears. Every argument to prove that Weah lacked the discipline, experience, and intellectual sophistication to navigate the complexities of the Liberian society did not resonate among a sizeable chunk of the people.
Ellen saw the drift. She read the mood of the people and, out of fear, assisted in orchestrating this historical disaster in order to avoid prosecution and buy time for her and the cabal she leads to hide their fortune in offshore accounts, real estate investment, mining, logging, port management, banking, etc.
Five years have come and gone. But the masses of West Point and other underclass communities, towns, and villages remain the wretched of the earth. As for the masses in West Point, they face a grim future. They are being displaced by perennial sea erosion. Many eke out a living on the margins of society with no hope of entry into the formal labour market due to zero investment in human capital and low-skill jobs although the CDC promised to create 1 million jobs in five years. 1 million jobs for the poor remains a delusion of grandeur.
Additionally, the neighbourhoods of West Point lack proper sanitation, safe drinking water, stable electricity, etc. Added to these harsh economic realities is the social crisis: the collapse of morals, the breakdown of values, the gang culture, the staggering rate of prostitution, teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, etc – the society is in the throes of anomie.
Amid these grotesque socio-economic conditions, what has been the intervention of the Weah regime? The installation of artificial turf on a small plot of land in the heart of West Point. What community need assessment was conducted to conclude that the construction of a football pitch is the foremost priority of the masses of poor West-Pointers remains an unanswered question. However, it says more about how detached this bankrupt government is from the ordinary people.
According to reliable sources, Weah usually instructs Trokon Kpee or whatever he is to use these meaningless projects with zero economic rates of return as an alibi to funnel money out of the public treasury. No wonder there are zero traces of the costs of these projects and the contracts are granted to Lebanese firms without exhausting the public procurement process. On social media, J.P. Melvin Dixon, Jr. a one-time supporter of Mr. Weah and the CDC frustratingly summed up the Weah tragedy: “We thought the palpay cud do much better for us since he originated from the slums of gibbratta, but it’s worst than it could be.”
The masses have seen right through this charade, evident by their expression of outrage in a series of mass protests over the last three years, as well as in the senatorial elections of 2019 and 2020. These are evident signs that the political consciousness of the people is not a stagnant pond, but rather one that is in constant flux and subject to change based on objective reality.
The popular mobilization of 2019 and 2020 were dress rehearsals. The masses will strike a decisive blow to this national infamy and accident of history sooner rather than later. The task facing all progressive forces is to humanize the masses through revolutionary social transformation. This, however, cannot be accomplished through the neo-colonial mode of economic and political organization that characterize every postcolonial African state: replacing a group of political vagrants with a group of brigands with different faces but similar character, similar agenda, and similar interests. The only alternative to this dystopia is revolutionary Pan African socialist transformation.
