Liberia: No Sympathy For You! An Open Letter To Amara Mohammed Konneh

Amara Mohammed Konneh

People who have a sense of history and saw through the incompetent gang in the CDC talked to you, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and other members of your cabal to abandon the plan of fraudulently imposing this boy and his assortment of spavs on the country knowing full well the consequences of such manoeuvre. They held long and serious discussions with you and predicted rightly all that is happening today and urged you to abort such plan but you were consumed in arrogance and selfishness and went on to do so against their pieces of advice. All of you listen not! You were resolved to steal the democratic verdict of the people for your preferred candidate. For you and Ellen, it was never about the destiny of the country; it was never about the country’s interests but rather about creating the condition where the inordinate wealth primitively accumulated from the people would have been protected with impunity and every effort to establish a commission of inquiry to probe impropriety done under your stewardship be killed.

You came here to Ghana and printed excess ballot papers which were used to inflate the votes of the CDC in the rural counties- an act very illegal that robbed the genuine winner of the process of his victory. In other words, it was not the people’s decision that won, but yours. You bribed Prince Johnson with some of the stolen funds to pledge support to the CDC. You bankrolled the party’s campaign in both the first and second rounds of the elections- even going against the ceiling for campaign funds enshrined in the new election law. The Supreme Court Bench was bought by you on the orders of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to rule against claims of fraud and irregularities in the elections. The NEC was made subservient! You and the chap name Sabastian Muah created a software that you both used to play with the results in the NEC data room, a scandal that was recently exposed by the expert witness of Telia Urey in his testimony before the NEC hearing officer. You had your way to the detriment of the country and its people. You made mockery of those who stood up to your scheme. You thought you had won, but history was to play a prank on you. You thought you had outsmarted decent patriots who had tears in their eyes as they watched you and Ellen Sirleaf foisted on the country the most rotten layer of the society, but your victory was to be short-lived.

It was not even the question of you exercising your democratic choice, but that brazen nerve to break the law, undermine institutions, and use stolen funds to ensure your decision becomes the final. It boggles the imagination because what has come to mean an electoral victory for the CDC is not the expressed will of the people, but the selfish will of you and your cabal. That the people’s choice would be tempered with to the extent that yours sufficed and the candidate you chose presides over the nation says a lot about you and the wretchedness of the characters of all who were behind such nasty project. That is a treason against the people which is punishable by burning at stake. For once, imagine how all of us were fooled to campaign, to debate, to risk our lives in the countryside only for the outcome to be determined by rotten forces who can only flourish when they keep the people in servitude, privation and damnation.

Now those you imposed took less than two years to finally gang rape the economy, despoil the country. See how the land of Blyden, Barclay and Porte has retrogressed and is on the brink of collapse. People like you are not patriots. For patriots do not place the fatherland in the hands of social hustlers and clueless misfits. They do not loot the national treasury when given the opportunity to serve so that they can tomorrow orchestrate a scheme that scandalizes the heritage of the space they occupy in order to hide their filth. A patriot has that mental attitude that places country above self, people above the individual. Like others did in 2005 and 2011 to stop this calamity from befallen on a post-war nation, a true patriot would have built the necessary forces in 2017 to prevent the country from sliding into the hands of these wretched of the earth instead of making the latter possible through criminal machinations.

So who am I to empathize with you as the Frankenstein monster you created comes consuming you to distract the attention of the public from its plundering of the treasury? You are now a despicable pawn in the chess game of power. You are now a punching bag. See how you have been played around like a toy. You were short-sighted and not farsighted. I recommend that you listen to Jimmy Cliff’s House of Exile. It might also teach you a lesson. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf defended her children publicly when they were exposed as nothing but petite criminals. What has she said about you since the so-called asset recovery team began unearthing the dirt you left at the Ministry of Finance? You have been thrown under the bus. You have been left alone to deal with this shame and disgrace.

You once sent your flunkeys to insult venerated struggle icons like HB but have you asked yourself why Patriot HB cannot be targeted by the hoodlums in the CDC under the veil of fighting corruption? He’s a discipline revolutionary. He dealt with Ellen for more than 30years of his struggle history. So he knows her well! That is why he was never drawn into her charm but chose to work with her in the interest of his country instead of joining her to defraud the Liberian people. He ennobled himself by working for the common good and sacrificing in order to make the greatest number of people happy. Thus, he despises wealth, luxury and all the glamour of power. HB knows that a man who concentrates in his coffers obscene wealth is a man who promotes obscene poverty for the many. That is why all his life, he dedicated himself to fighting for the African people instead being fixated on building mansions, buying cars, making luxury travels, etc. Can we say the same about you?

The files are there. And just the hiring of a credible international auditing firm can provide the hard evidence for your prosecution. But we are aware that the Ponzi scheme by your government will end in a blind alley. For it is not genuine as those gangsters in the ruling-CDC have no moral standing to initiate an asset recovery scheme after George Weah has built 49condiminious, demolished and rebuilt his 9^th Street residence, bought a private jet, hundreds of acres of land, etc. It is rather a tactic to not only draw public attention away from the rapid pace at which the country is being reduced to nothing but also meant to dampen your ambition in Gbarpolu County like they did to you in the by-election of 2018 in Montserrado County. The task to bring to book people of your kind is the task of a genuine revolutionary government committed to the concept of social transformation.

It is totally unfortunate that some young people in the Unity Party whom you did not listen to yesterday have signed up to the bandwagon of sycophancy to come in your defence in the name of “He provided scholarship for me to study at an Ivy League university.” Plain wrong! We say to those young people that Amara Konneh did not do you a favour. He did not pay your fees from his pocket. As he was educated at Harvard University by the state, Liberia is your country and you too deserved to have been educated at the expense of its resources so that you may place your talents and skills at the service of the people. Thus your loyalty should be to the country and not the individual who sees you as an object to legitimize his greed and avarice. See how those he helped to criminally take the power in 2017 have deprived resourceful young men and women like you from executing your part of the bargain: serving in the civil service upon completion of your studies. It is a lost to the country. It is a lost to the country that after spending thousands of tax dollars to fund your education, you cannot serve the Liberian people only because the riffraff that Amara Konneh imposed feel insecure and threatened by your brilliance and competence.

Comrades, when you needed Amara Konneh to join you in 2017 to abort this calamity, he derided you and chose to do as he pleased so leave him to feel the pinch of his actions as it befalls him. Remember that in 2017 you rang his number; he looked at his phone and avoided your calls. You scheduled many meetings with him but he boycotted. Why are you now mounting defence for him when those he created are calling for his blood? In politics, people pay dearly for their blunders, no less so when you were advised against it but arrogance pursued the path to satisfy certain outrageous desires. If anything, prudence must tell you that your defence for Amara is absolutely wrong and to go to such degree of slavishness. It is like the CDC elements whom you oppose and lambast for doing the same for Samuel Tweah and George Weah. In the end, it boils down to everyone defending their rogues. Where is that patriotism, that outrage, and that morality to make thieves account for their corruption?

Make no mistake: we cannot construct a new Liberia of progress and transformation and innovation when we shield con men based on the flimsy rationale of friendship. We cannot cherry pick rogues. A rogue, whether our friends or buddies, are no less rogues and ought to be ostracized from society as human plagues. Elements who wrecked the republic or used treachery to force their political choice on the people must answer for their action and they don’t deserve our sympathy and solidarity. People like Amara who without the state would have probably being doing menial jobs on the side lines of Philadelphia to survive, a man who came to Liberia in the aftermath of 2006 with just a pair of shoes benefited more from the country and in the end chose to devour it. He must answer for his plunder and be dragged into prison. Fighting corruption cannot just be about empty rhetoric but concrete actions. Our commitment to a genuine national project is questioned when we are seen on social media defending unrepentant criminals. A corrupt criminal is essentially a mass murderer because funds meant for hospitals, to deliver social services are pocketed causing deaths and destructions. Thus, corruption is not a victimless crime, but a crime of mass destruction.

For us, we mourn not but rejoice as Amara Konneh is left to reckon with the wrath from his handiwork. We celebrate as he sits and soberly reflects and eventually bows his head in shame for all that he did to the Liberian people. That is if he has a moral conscience, because moral conscience disallows anybody to rig an election and acquire` such amount of obscene wealth from the poor people. Amara, the Liberian people have been faced with bigger challenges before in the political history of this country. They confronted an arrogant oligarchy that strangulated the country for 135years. The dictatorship of Samuel K. Doe came and had to reckon with the revolutionary heroism of the Liberian people. In the final analysis, the Liberian people will march on and triumph over this nightmare, this national scandal which you helped to create. The Liberian people will correct this anomaly as they did when mad men like Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson held guns against them. For a chap like you, your fate is fatal. You will have no role to play in the new Liberia of social justice and equality or to paraphrase the words of that brilliant British journalist John Wight, an Amara will be given a jail term long enough to get his head straight and get back in touch with humanity after a spell of hard labour and re-education. Or better still, he will be relegated to a footnote of history! “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”!

About the Authors:
Moses Uneh Yahmia and Alfred P. B. Kiadii are political activists and 2018 graduates of the Department of Political Science, University of Liberia. Yahmia can be reached via [email protected] while Kiadii can be reached via [email protected]