The Making Of An Imperial President

I firmly believe that dictators and other autocratic rulers are not born; they are made. A good case in point is Liberia 's President William Tubman. Whatever inherent modesty President Tubman was born with was eroded by 27 years of the sycophantic praises that were heaped on the man by the Legislative and Judiciary branches of the government as members of the same fraternity -- the True Whig Party. Of course the Executive branch was a pawn for being at the base of Tubman's presidential authority.

Ordinary citizens soon followed suit until it was an anathema to regard Tubman less than the political deity into which he had evolved. This further strengthened the grips of the True Whig Party on the whole population until it became a state policy to have every government employee “contribute” a month's salary to the Party each year. And why not; it was the only political party allowed in the country.

However, while it took us 27 years to turn Tubman into a self-absorbed autocrat, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will be sped on her way to a new record of greatness-by-design if the likes of Defense Minister Brownie Samukai are allowed to have their way. Here is why.

As I was reading Mr. Samukai's article with the title “Four-Lane Traffic and Transport Congestion…,” in the Wednesday, November 14, 2007, edition of the Inquirer newspaper, I was struck -- in an amusing way -- by the author's injection of an undigested “Malthusian Population Thesis” in the middle of his argument, just as I was getting to appreciate it.

This is how it came out: “We have an upward growth population taking the trend as postulated by Malthusian Population Thesis, driving towards the center ( Monrovia ) from jobs, family connection, social contacts…” But only after I read the last two sentences of the article, did I realize that this was merely a rehearsal of Liberia 's National Sycophantic Orchestra. And this is because Mr. Samukai concluded as follows: “How about the Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf Parkway ! That should be the future.”

I will, however, beg to make a quick exit from the Sirleaf Parkway to conclude what I first found both interesting and amusing about Mr. Samukai's article -- the “Malthusian Population Thesis.”

“Malthusian” is from Thomas Malthus, an English economist and sociologist. He is regarded as a pioneer in the study of population. He is best known for his published work An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society , which came out in 1798. He said that the growth of the world's population would outstrip mankind's ability to provide food.

He also said that nature had three ways of checking the earth's otherwise disastrous population growth. He listed war, famine, and disease as nature's ways of correcting unplanned population growth. Years later Malthus added a fourth factor -- “moral restraint” -- as a means of keeping the world's population within barely sustainable limits. Brownie Samukai merely supplied the traffic congestion in downtown Monrovia as the fifth drag on population explosion.

Now back on the un-built Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Parkway , which Mr. Samukai sees as the future of Liberia . Well, how can anyone argue with such obvious fact? The fact is this: All roads are in the future of Liberia because we managed to build none in 160 years of our national existence.

We have barely begun to dig ourselves from under the debris of our self-inflicted catastrophe, in response to which the world has now camped in Liberia with all manners of help. They are hoping to get us in some decent enough shape as a pretext for moving on to other trouble spots in the world with more help.

Yet it appears that we have already forgotten how we got into the mess in the first place. Even so, it would appear that the “Malthusian Population Thesis” does not provide sufficient justification for my charge of sycophancy as leveled against Mr. Samukai and other cheerleaders of this administration. There was something else.

The November 19, 2007, edition of the Inquirer newspaper carried a story titled “Defense Renovating Post Stockade.” The lead paragraph read: “The Ministry of National Defense has commenced a massive rehabilitation of the historic Post Stockade detention center, which was used by the government in the past to detain military personnel and political prisoners.”

So, here is what I want to know. We already have coup plotters in prison -- never mind that one of them was pardoned ahead of conviction or acquittal, and two were convicted and remain unpardoned . Of course one may argue with the word pardon , but not necessarily its effect. These are people our government has reasons to believe were trying to wage a coup while fully armed, 10,000 United Nations soldiers are stationed in this country.

Although the UN troops are not yet shaking in their boots about pending encounters with new rebel groups, we cannot ignore any reported threats, especially if our own government is making the claims.

So, here is my question. If the facilities for holding alleged capital criminals are converted to museums in honor of political leaders once held in those same facilities, then where are we going to put the new criminals who are working to overthrow this government?

I am talking about convicted coup plotters like the ones currently in prison. If the government entertains any hope -- as it must -- that the conviction of some of the current crop of coup planners will stand, then where are we going to keep them before executions or before they have served any life sentences, or (and better still) before they are pardoned?

Let's not forget that if the coup plotters didn't have a chance to succeed in their enterprise, it was most likely because the United Nations soldiers are here in such massive numbers. When the UN leaves, we can reasonably expect an upsurge of coup plotting and rumors of coup. Reason enough to keep detention facilities updated and available; not set them aside for recreational use at the President's whim.

But get this. There's going to be another wave of refugees just from the Post Stockade renovation project because, according to the same Inquirer article, Deputy Defense Minister for Operation, Mr. Othello Daniel Warrick, said that “all those occupying structures around the facility should vacate immediately.”

Wow! They are already angry with the people living near the Post Stockade. Never mind how they got there, shouldn't we be making some accommodation for those who will be displaced “in an effort to make the President's dream come true”?

Here is the origin of the drive to turn Post Stockade into a tourist attraction: “Some time this year [2007] when she visited the Post Stockade, President Sirleaf, who had just visited her prison room at the Post Stockade, where she was detained in the 1980s, after she was held for sedition by the former government of Samuel Doe, proposed the need to transform the facility into a museum, something which has been embraced in many quarters,” the Inquirer reported.

Here is an even bigger problem. Ostensibly, the reason we are turning the Post Stockade into a museum is because, among other considerations, President Sirleaf was once held there. For now never mind the fact that Mrs. Sirleaf was charged with sedition, which is roughly the same charge for which two convicted coup plotters are currently awaiting sentencing.

Let's look instead at the political axiom that one of the best ways to beat a sedition charge is to become President by any means necessary. That's what Charles Taylor did. He did not fight his embezzlement charge in court -- admittedly a lesser charge than treason.

Taylor fought the indictment on the battlefield and won by becoming President of Liberia. The same chance Charles Taylor got is what all coup plotters fight for. It follows, therefore, that once coup plotters succeed, they get to determine what's law and what isn't law. That's why the Constitution is often the first target for destruction or neutralization after a coup.

Although coup intervention is a familiar problem, we are still nowhere near accepting it as a fact of our political life. We are still fighting it. This problem manifests itself mostly in the lack of smooth transition between regimes in Africa .

For instance, when Samuel Doe killed President William Tolbert, there was a call for a new Constitution while key provisions of the old one were suspended. And although it cost over three million U.S. dollars to put together the new Constitution, it is, on balance, not much better than the old one. But to the degree that it made a lot of us feel good about having done something, I think the effort was worth it.

But Samuel Doe and his fellow coup makers dumped the bodies of slain President William Tolbert and nearly all of his cabinet officers in a mass grave on the wet shoulder of a dirty stream passing the Palm Grove Cemetery at its southern edge. Their bodies are still there! But we have yet to turn this national disaster into an opportunity for unity.

If this nation has a conscience, it should face the fact that Tolbert was a fairly decent President. In fact -- and to be strictly moral about -- Tolbert didn't have to be an exceptional President to deserve a grave he could call his own.

Yet 27 years after we killed President Tolbert, we still have not visited the site or the justification for disposing of his body and those of his cabinet officers so crudely. And we can't even claim that we have not given the matter much thought. How couldn't we? We've thought about everything else around and between the events that led to the brutal killing of President Tolbert.

Worse still, the man who is largely credited with undermining the Tolbert regime before the 1980 coup makers moved in for the kill -- Mr. Gabriel Bacchus Matthews -- got a state funeral by lying in state at the Centennial Pavilion in August 2007 before his burial in a grave in which he is a single occupant.

President William Tolbert's unmarked and crowded grave has yet to attract national attention. But we are ready, it seems, to tie up badly needed national assets to honor the current President without giving her a chance to prove that she is worthy either the honor or the expense.

It was the sycophants who gave us President William Tubman's birthday as a national holiday. Even so, Tubman's National Sycophantic Orchestra took ten years to fine-tune its act of singing his praises. But it has taken the current administration barely two years to orchestrate its own praise-singing. We already have an Ellen Johnson Sirleaf song, dance, Parkway, line of clothing, and now a museum for preserving the cell in which she spent time as a treason suspect.

I cannot stand in the way of what people want; but I think we need to tidy up some of the mess we made. I call for a very simple and decent thing that we need to do right now. Let's bury our Presidents properly, no matter the means by which they came into or left office. Currently we have two elected Presidents who need proper burial: President William Tolbert and President Samuel Doe.

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Contact Tarty Teh at : e-Mail: TartyTeh@aol.com / Phone and text: (231) 05-653-568