By Jerome Koon
MONROVIA – Several Liberians including a businesswoman, students, and a political commentator; have criticized D-Flow Flomo-yarbo, Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS) Deputy Director-General for New Media and Rebranding, for his recent salary-cut demand against Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA) Commissioner Patrick Honnah.
Flomo-yarbo recently suggested slashing in the pay of Honnah following a one-off incident where the LTA Commissioner sprayed money amounting to $US5 he had exchanged to Liberian dollars, at members of a local band who were performing at Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah’s birthday anniversary.
But as many other Liberians expressing dissent against Flomo-yarbo’s pay-cut demand, businesswoman and an enthusiastic LBS listener, Mariam Browne, sees nothing wrong in a man who once worked as Manager for Public Relations for Firestone-Liberia, and now working in government, spending his earnings in a manner that profits entertainers of a local band.
Browne believes Flomo-yarbo is not that busy; and it implies that the LBS Deputy Director-General is not really performing the work allotted to him at state radio and television, as the main reasons why he’s replying to every gossip and irrelevant issues on social media.
“I watch the Liberia National Television (LNTV) closely,” said Browne, adding that Flomo-yarbo, as Director of New Media and Rebranding being oblivious of the job, just instructs that just anything is live-streamed on LNTV, whether it’s a poor public relations for the very government whose policies and programs are to be promoted by LBS.”
One political analyst, Levi Fahn, for his part lambasted Flomo-yarbo as a greenhorn to government operations and declared that the LBS Deputy Director-General does not know how and why pay cuts are done in the public sector.
He accuses Flomo-yarbo of engaging in petit jealousy against LTA Commissioner Honnah, who unlike the LBS Deputy Director-General for New Media and Rebranding he claims, is much better qualified credential-wise and by experience since he had worked in other roles in government.
“I don’t fault him. This is his first high-profile government assignment,” Fahn contributed, criticizing Flomo-yarbo for being mediocre, as to pick on another government official who has served even in a superior capacity at LBS than the one he (Flomo-yarbo) currently occupies, a new position created politically to placate him.
The hollow reasoning of D-Flow and his associates, unjustly condemning Patrick for giving members of a local band share of his rightful income amid unemployment, hardship, and inflation, is trivializing the fact that the LTA Commissioner did what he did to assist some of the very people who are feeling the bite of hardship and inflation in the country, asserted Fahn, who believes that it is not within the TOR of the LBS Deputy Director-General to insist on salary-cut from another government official, simply because said official was generous.
“Let D-Flow shut up and stick to his work that he knows very little about,” university student Paul Jackson commented, believing the Deputy Director-General of LBS was out of line, when he demanded salary-reduction on Honnah.
“Salary-cut should instead be enforced against D-Flow, who is being remunerated by task payers’ funds for work he does not know anything about,” Jackson stated, and went on, “As Deputy Director-General, he neither has the professional qualification nor the technical capability and required job experience for a person occupying such a role, compared to Patrick, who is overqualified and is rightfully earning his pay.”
“This is a basic question D-Flow ought to have asked himself before requesting Patrick’s pay to be cut in envy,” averred Jackson, who argued that the Deputy Director-General of New Media and Rebranding at LBS ought to have first established if Honnah was implicated in any fraudulent transaction to have acquired the money he was spending to empower performers of a local ban?”
Jackson asserted he is of the view that, as long as there is no physical evidence linking Honnah to having done any act of corruption in order to have received the money he used to sponsor performers of a local band, the LTA Commissioner did not do anything wrong.
Fallah Johnson, along with a number of other students, who requested not to be named for this article, explained that he views what Honnah did at Piah’s birthday anniversary party as supporting a group of Liberian performers in need and that this was worth no condemnation, criticism, and not even a single cent taken from the LTA Commissioner’s salary.
