By
J. Patrick Flomo
jpflomo@outlook.com
614-707-3636
In the past 12 years, Liberia did upend the male-dominated political hegemony in black Africa by electing the first woman president on the continent. In the 2017 elections, the Liberian people once again changed the political topography of black Africa by electing a former professional soccer star as president, the first in black Africa.
Liberia has, in the past three scores and ten, exercised one democratic transfer of power — the transfer of power from President Edwin Barclay to President-elect William V.S. Tubman in 1944 when Liberia was almost a century old. The near-flawless 2017 election has provided the opportunity for the Liberian people to exercise the norm of Republican government — the orderly and peaceful transfer of power for a second time. In the context of Liberia’s cosmopolitanism and level of sophistication in the democratic electoral process, the conduct of this election (free of violence and voter fraud) can be viewed as Liberia’s magnum opus election of the 21st century.
The 2017 election was like a symphony performed with the ultimate dulcet of harmonic strings. The principal players, the Liberian people, exercised their constitutional rights to vote (the supreme source of power in a Republican government) with dignity and style, unlike what the world saw in the recent Kenya elections. The feeling was that this election has ushered in a new dawn of a democratic nurturing process for Liberia. For example, the battleground for competition was a level playing field for all the competitors. The incumbent government’s neutrality in this election is a remarkable political milestone relative to Africans (e.g., Kenya) and other totalitarian governments (e.g., Russia) that use the power of government to silence the opposition.
While the peaceful nature of the election and the pending orderly transfer of power to a new government is a milestone in Liberia’s recent history, the newly president-elect is, I think, not up to the task of the monumental challenges that face Liberia. He is not a student of Liberia’s structural endemic political, social, and economic institutionalized system, nor does he have the intellectual discipline or governing acumen to grapple with the plethora of elephantine problems of poverty, poor educational system, astronomical unemployment and underemployment, very poor healthcare system, the endemic and insidious nature of corruption (something that has become part of our DNA), the monopolization of the domestic economy by Lebanese and other foreign nationals, gross economic injustice (the pending anarchy), and infrastructure underdevelopment (electricity, water, roads). The danger here is that the learning curve for anyone in the epicenter of this whirling state of challenges is extremely short and the arc of the looming problems is fast approaching a crisis of cosmic proportions.
Moving forward, the Liberian people demand to know how the president-elect is going to address these chronic problems that are inhibiting the capacity of Liberia, a country rich in natural resources and human capital, to improve the lives of its 3.5 million people. Since the president-elect was not challenged to articulate his position on these issues during the campaign, he now should do so. The people should insist that this be his first act as president. Now that we have elected a new president whose resume speaks far less about his knowledge of how government and institutions work, we have to work with him to move Liberia forward. We know that modernity in Liberia has been at a very slow pace for decades. To accelerate progress (under this new administration) toward better education, healthcare, job training and job creation, economic justice, and to fight against the endemic of corruption, we must vigorously challenge the government and hold the three branches of government accountable when they fail to deliver.
The 2017 election marks a watershed moment in the history of Liberian democracy. And, it has set Liberia on a path to a maturing political process. A template has now been created and the hope is that Liberian political academicians will synthesize it and vacuum out the fog so that the symphony of the next election will sound like Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. We must regard this template as our manifest destiny to expand constitutional democracy across the African continent.
21stcenturypanafricaagendadotorg 