Honor Thy Father of the MillenniumHonor Thy Father of the MillenniumIf whim, which foils prediction of each of their next moves, is a natural gift for African leaders, then their quest for accolades is conversely easy to predict. This means that predictability can only land the predictor within the realm of folly for a given African leader; it does not determine which station, along the path of foolish consistency, may be next. With this in mind, let’s take a look at what the Liberian National News Agency (LINA) circulated on its wire network:
"President Taylor has won the ‘Father of the Millennium’ award in London, England, during the recent International Youth Conference. Making the disclosure last Thursday during the dinner hosted for Lone Star players, the Youth Advisor to the President, Benjamin Sanvee, said the award is in recognition of President Taylor’s love and care for the young people of Liberia." – LINA (4/24/00)
Jealousy cannot be ruled out as a motive for anyone who would frame a question against this obviously monumental achievement by President Charles Taylor. But I am not sure if any award has ever been issued for so large a time span and without any hints of spatial limits. The renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, for instance, got only a piece of the millennium – a tenth of it, it turned out – when Time Magazine named him "Man of the Century" this year. We are told that there is hardly any spatial separation between a genius and a plain nut. Taylor could very well be the latter.
I, for instance, was once named "Distinguished Liberian Citizen" for 1996 by a Liberian church in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. Even so, some people said I did not deserve the honor. Some argued that some of my friends had engineered my selection for the honor. Yet, the recognition was only for one year, by one church group, for a given population of a given nation.
While I was not all that sure someone else didn’t deserve the tribute more, I did not understand the logic of my detractors who devalued the input of my friends as character witnesses. Nevertheless, in 1997, I had a part time job through the temporary job agency, Career U.S.A., in Washington, D.C., and won the honor of "Employee of the Year" for that company, but only for its Washington, D.C., area district. This time, however, no one interviewed any of my friends as a means of determining the value of my job performance.
But what if the church or the job agency said that I was "Citizen" or "Employee of the Century"? That would have strained credulity and taken away from the sincerity of the professed homage. Even before someone found out that I was a dedicated worker, I would have had a similar opinion of myself in that regard. And so, such honors both affirm and confirm what we suspect as individuals in our quest for glory. We should therefore be suspicious of honors without discernable bounds.
I cannot disagree that President Charles Taylor is "Father of the Millennium" without a context. As father for his children, a millennium may not be long enough for what his children could confer on him, especially given that there are no other fathers competing in the arena of his brood. Logic excludes other fathers enough to make the point moot. But this particular honor comes as result of "President Taylor’s love and care for the young people of Liberia."
The foregoing is a drastic departure from what was the prevailing thought before this honor rolled in. The question was whether Taylor should live despite his crimes, or die because of them. A credible spin away from that question should not start with an award that ignores Taylor’s most recent and immeasurable destruction of lives. There are people who are afraid of Taylor enough to keep quiet. The quiet ones are perhaps not so dangerous as those who break into a song and dance out of fear of the man.
Do we really think that Charles Taylor doesn’t know that those who are fishing for honors for him are acting out of fear? If Taylor does know, then what does accepting the honor say about his own mental state? It will not even be fair to question the motives of those who conferred the honor. Survival is motive enough any day in Liberia. I am only wondering what Taylor thinks this honor is worth in the eyes of people outside his sphere of deadly influence.
Can we assume that Taylor has no faculty for perceiving the preposterous dimensions of the honor the sycophants bestowed on him? President Taylor earned some respect without the sycophants’ enhancements which now dilute what plausible ground was left for not declaring him insane.
President Samuel Doe had no such luck. He was barely literate, and so stupidity was the predicted cause of any administrative malfunction that resulted from applying even textbook remedies to any of the many problems Liberia faced. So Taylor was contrasted with Doe as smart enough not to do the obviously foolish thing. And so when the Dokie family was wiped out just a week after the Taylor government listed Mr. Dokie as "an enemy of the state," one of the refrains was that Taylor was too smart to be a part of a messy way of silencing opponents. President Doe would have been stupid enough to do such a thing.
I could not argue but so much with the claim about President Doe’s stupidity. Only now such is also President Taylor’s growing profile. Here is an example of President Doe at his weakest. One day he looked at the figures of, perhaps, the GNP for some of the friendly G7 nations and decided to ask for help toward his development goals for Liberia. He asked the U.S. for two billion dollars; Japan one billion; the EEC, two billion. Soon President Doe had over five billion dollars.
I am not sure if any of the countries or institutions replied to his requests. I don’t believe the problem lay with the countries and institutions that got President Doe’s requests. I thought President Doe didn’t know how big a billion was – even the American billion, not the British one. If President Doe was required to write down the number, he might be a bit more impressed by it and less glib in asking for it. The number $1,234,567,890 would be roughly 1.2 billion dollars. That’s more than twice the amount of money he was asking for.
Similarly, I wonder if President Taylor understands the scope of a thousand years. Maybe if we quit calling it a millennium then it would not seem so compact. Galileo lived roughly 400 years ago. Along the way he, I believe, spent some time in jail for saying the earth moved around the sun. That must have been soon after he, or some other nut, said the thing was not flat.
When Galileo plunged into physics and astronomy, there was barely any previous knowledge in those endeavors to go on. Every subsequent thinker had the notes of the previous thinkers until we got Internet and e-mail. So what did Taylor do for his people, let alone mankind, to occupy such a large chunk of human existence as "Father of the Millennium"? Perhaps the Romans had a right idea but the wrong man when they sentenced Galileo to prison. Taylor needs to go to jail – again.
Whose fault is it? Taylor continues to get what he wants. And so over time, what was sincerely ours becomes his. And heaping accolades on him helps him more than it helps us. But now that the sycophants have given away the biggest honor, what will we give Taylor next time he comes calling? That may be sooner than we think, unless we send him packing first. And if we don’t act soon, there will be no honor left for ourselves. – Tarty Teh [Washington, D.C., April 29,2000]
Copyrighted © Tarty Teh 2000
