Helping Ourselves First
By Tarty Teh

There is a simple plan that most dictatorial leaders follow. It calls for liberal application of violence in the face of resistance of their selfish authority. That means death and destruction. There is no master plan beyond that. Yet, in the face of the devastation this simple, uninspired plan causes, we often ascribe high cerebral activity to the head of the dictator. These are not thinkers; they are destroyers. That’s what Idi Amin was.

As far as strategies are concerned, there are none. But because unprovoked destruction defies prediction, the dictator’s victims are often helpless in determining what may happen to them next. And so, to the degree that it works, and to the extent that it is difficult to plan against it, it is as good as any strategy conceived of brilliant thinking.

President Charles Taylor and his coadjutors are simple destroyers. They completely lack what civic sensibilities that would cause a normal person to be fearful of public reaction to shameless waste of public resources for personal entertainment. Debate would have been warranted if President Taylor and his enforcers were only in violation of public policies. Far from it, they are destroying national assets along with any hope of building something – anything – while they are around. So the choices have never been made clearer.

We the Liberian people, on the one hand, and the Taylor gang, on the other, are all looking at the same picture, and we are interpreting it exactly the same way. Only they are not talking. It doesn’t look good for the Taylor side. They know it and we know it. More than that, the rats are now poised to run. Has anyone heard lately from the Liberian minister of information Joe Mulbah, or his mega-mouth deputy Milton Teahjay who was a regular on BBC’s Focus in explaining the promises of the Taylor government in mid-1999? Director of the cabinet Blamoh Nelson has not renewed his injunction that the people should not look to President Charles Taylor for any answers. Taylor’s visible agents are now rehearsing their post-Taylor excuses.

Getting rid President Taylor is a practical matter, not a matter of philosophical disagreement. We simply cannot afford Taylor. He has more "wives" than his professed Christian faith calls for; he has more cars than needed to move about; he occupies more physical space than any Liberian president before him; and his zone of discomfort is expanding at a rate that continues to dislodge residential as well as work-place neighbors around Liberia.

What do we get for allowing this man to have his way with us? We get nothing. I mean literally nothing. We will not get the help that was due us for going through the exercise called elections. Yes, the international community has determined that it is a waste to try to help Liberia while Taylor is around. Not that they will not help us, they cannot.

Again, it is neither sophistication nor sophistry. President Charles Taylor has his reason for shutting down the independent radio stations in the country. He is about to administer another dose of the shock treatment from which we are only now showing signs of recovery. It is that simple. He has willing killers who are ready to force us to our knees again.

Now, let’s get real in our expectation for help. We have to prove to the United States and other Western powers that if we are put back in the saddle, we have the determination to hold on. We can best prove that through our own initiative in getting rid of Taylor without causing dislocation of our own citizens. We need no territorial war because the trouble is right there in Monrovia.

To his credit, however, President Charles Taylor has given us every excuse we need to end the shameful treatment we get from him every day. But, as I have said many times before, I do not seek – nor do we need – actions that would render the 1997 elections irrelevant. To be sure, we could do without the 1997 election results, but the justification for discarding the results of the elections might make only Liberian sense. Internationally, however, it will likely end up being regarded as another garden variety of African excuses for aborting democracy.

In that light, Vice President Enoch Dogolea may not look all that attractive as an alternative to President Taylor, but he is our only ticket to democratic continuity. Even so, such transition should be abbreviated in favor of another election. But if you think Vice President Dogolea is a bad choice, wait till you meet the 12 heads of the independent political parties that lost big to President Taylor in the 1997 presidential election. What is remarkable about the heads of the political parties is that the merits of a somewhat scaled-down field of contestants has not registered with them even after their colossal and embarrassing loss to Charles Taylor.

Of course, if I could find a convincing reason for denying Vice President Dogolea the right to run for a second term, I would not have cared if the field of candidates for president of Liberia had doubled. But if Dogolea has a modicum of knowledge about how to wield the impressive Taylor war machine, he would rout the Dumb Dozen from the past presidential election, and a farmer’s dozen in the next.

It makes no sense to preoccupy ourselves with removing Taylor independently only to end up in dispute among ourselves for lack of pre-approved plan about what to do next. If we don’t agree now on what to do after Taylor, we may end up with someone who will abruptly put us on his plan, which may go deeper than the eight years remaining on the 12-year Taylor plan we are currently on. And if our next redeemer is only half as bad as Taylor, we may be looking at eternity.

There will be justifiable objections to using any part of the government that came about through Taylor. But we must be careful not to toss out the vote of the people. The benefit of this comes in two parts: a) making the vote count forces the population to think hard about how they cast their vote if there is a next time, and b) careless voting in the past is punished by living with the result of that balloting into the future. Either way, Charles Taylor has been president of Liberia for way too long. – Tarty Teh [Washington, D.C., March 18, 2000]