By: Varney Dukuly
MONROVIA: Former Executive Producer at the erstwhile KISS FM, Dr. Zazay Kpadeh, has laid out his argument to the governing Unity Party Alliance led administration, narrating why President Joseph Nyuma Boakai should give a listening ear to former Auditor General of Liberia, John S. Morlu.
Dr. Kpadeh contends that ex-AG Morlu’s radical remedies are necessary for Liberia’s progress.
In a write-up embedded with suggestions of vexing issues that must be tackled by the new administration from Mr. Morlu, the writer forcefully asserted that “President Boakai who knows the essence of good governance is perfectly mute on the Morlu dogma.”
“President Boakai, who knows this pioneering paragon of good governance very well, and who just before today was declaring the dawn of a new day based on anti-corruption fight, transparency and accountability, is perfectly mute on the Morlu dogma,” Dr. Kpadeh emphasized in his latest Writeup.
“He has dropped the arrow he perfectly needs to achieve the long-held objectives of his pre-presidential ambitions,” Kpadeh stressed.
Dr. Kpadeh also described as sad, the silence of transparency icons associated with the Boakai’s administration, particularly people who are the remnants of Liberia’s progressive struggle for “rice and rights”, such as Samuel Kofi Woods, Tiawan Saye Gongloe, Alaric Tokpa, Dougbeh Chris Nyan, and others.
He maintains that “their silence has clearly made them unfriendly not only on what their philosophical direction for the new government is, but also on the necessarily radical and progressive overtures of young John Semebe Morlu.”
The central issue of Dr. Kpadeh’s analysis is that throughout the 2023 Presidential and Legislative elections campaign, Morlu spoke and wrote extensively about the urgency to prepare to fight corruption and graft or the use of public offices to accumulate quick wealth by a few.
He wrote about the reckless disregard for the felt needs of the people; the domination of the country’s economy by foreign moguls; about bad labor practices against Liberian workers; about governmental subservience if not slavery to international lending institutions such as IMF, World Bank, etc.; about the pride and arrogance of government officials, about elitism; about growing filth and garbage in urban and rural communities; poverty wages for civil servants and corporate workers,” Kpadeh asserted.
“These are issues”, he said, “must be dealt with to give Liberians the assurance that the new government is genuinely serious of a New Day.”
In his argument, Dr. Kpadeh focused on Morlu’s utterances projecting his passion for a clean break with traditional Liberian political culture.
“The Morlu’s clarion calls are consistent with the campaign mantra of the Unity Party. And he was being celebrated by the section of the Liberian public that thinks that truly, a change was dawning on the horizon,” Dr. Kpadeh’s pointed out in his Writeup.
“The second thing, sadly, is that Morlu has made himself a premature vicious enemy of hardcore inner circle UPists, who see his posturing as inimical to their quest for plunder and pillage; that Morlu is opting to put sand in their gari. As a consequence of the foregoing, Morlu has disappeared in the maze of things right now as the government is being formed.”
The analysis also focused heavily on the history of the former auditor general, describing how he has proven to be a tested anti-corruption fighter.
“His inclusion in government as Auditor General is one of the best crowns in Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s legacy. He is credited for breaking the glass ceiling, standing up to entrenched economic pillagers whom he named and shamed publicly.
He was unbending in flashing enormous embers of transparency and accountability into Liberia’s opaque, corruption-laden bureaucracy. He is widely celebrated for giving the Sirleaf government an aura of local and international approbation and facelift, even at the discomfort of the president and her top advisors and supporters,” Kpadeh added.
The analysis points to the urgent need to kick-out bad governance under the Boakai-Koung administration.
One paragraph of the Kpadeh article said, instead of emboldening him, and craving to be blessed by the rise of more John Morlus, who has the audacity to “call sin by its name”, to name and shame scoundrels, and help entrench the ruling party into its own dogmatic space, including keeping it to its campaign promises, some high-up UPists are calling for Morlu’s annihilation.
According to the him, one UP bigwig was recently heard counteracting Morlu on Spoon Talk, saying: “If John thinks we will be taking armed soldiers to government officials’ offices to demand accountability and transparency, he’s kidding. We won’t. We have no x-ray machines to scan human bellies to know who’s corrupt and who’s not.”
Kpadeh, in his article, described such assertion as a “paralyzingly shameful defense and cover-up.”
His analysis also wove in how most well-intentioned recent leaders of Liberia got swayed off from the tracks, from their purposed drive to lead well.
Kpadeh: “Provocatively and adequately, John Sembe Morlu, as far as the Liberian people know, has confronted President Boakai with this vicious circle in time and the new president appears to missing out on it.”
The ruling Unity Party (UP), is yet to respond to Dr. Zayzay Kpadeh’s latest writeup.
