Liberia: Daily Observer, Don’t Blink.

 

Thank you for the invaluable experience of reading your letter to the President every day for the past several months. Every day I read it, I gain new inspiration, new understanding of human nature and the world.  It is like reading your favorite scriptures from which you derive or discover amazing insights each time you read those passages. 

During this editorial marathon, I have been touched spiritually by your faith in God which comes through unmistakably although nothing in that vein is mentioned in the letter. My own intelligence on the eventual ascendency of truth, right and justice and how they happen in the experiences of individuals, nations and civilizations, has increased tremendously and I am thankful.

I realize you would much rather receive the money due you by the Government of Liberia than engage in this strruggle. However, the lessons of this battle and the sacrifice of your opinion space and the financial deprivation which you and your staff suffer in the cause of justice for the media and for all businesses in the country who are victims of this government's blatant unfairness, corruption and callousness, is not lost on those of us who care about Liberia and its image in the world. 

This President’s usual habit is to ignore criticism, hoping that some other issue or event will drown the voices of his critics while he sails on, impervious to the approaching tsunami of disaster on the horizon if he remains in power.  Like the emperor without clothes, he hears only the cacophony of sycophants or buries his head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. The clarion cry that the President is buck naked gets louder but falls on his deaf ears.  As Nero fiddled, Rome burned.

Those powerful individuals close to the President who refuse to advise and steer him towards good governance, good judgment and values, better statesmanship, cannot or should not count on their exemption from blame and consequences for his unprincipled and often illegal actions. 

It took seven plagues of increasingly painful intensity to get pharaoh to acquiesce to 

God’s demand to free the Israelites. Still that heart of stone caused Pharaoh to renege on letting them go and the rest, as they say, is history. Liberian people say, ‘if you don’t listen, you will feel’.

By now, some of your readers, family and friends must be advising you to “let it be so now; you have made your point”.  Don’t blink.  

For now, we can all adjust to reading your editorials, or ours as citizen editorialists, on the Op Ed space where this message is printed. What matters most is the writing on the wall: Mini mini tekel upharsin. ….

The history of the Daily Observer is well known by many and for those born after the 1990s, it is available online.  We all ought to pay attention and reflect on the not so distant past when your newspaper was born and grew up under the merciless and murderous regime of Samuel K. Doe who unceasingly attacked you with arsons, imprisonments and repeated closures.  Your courage and perseverance under his tyranny and that of another country’s despot, cannot be erased.  By the grace of God you survived those ordeals. 

The day of reckoning eventually came for Doe and those who committed atrocities against you and your staff.  Indeed, retribution came for Doe and his henchmen who committed the most heinous and egregious crimes against the Liberian people. If the dead could speak they might be more effective in convincing their successors in power to mend their ways to avoid the severe punishment that befell Doe and his thugs and other leaders like them.

I hope this President will be reasonable and fair to you and end my amazing discoveries of who we Liberians are as enablers of good and evil and our stunning heedlessness. The alarming warnings and nightmarish revelations gained from this teachable episode in our current events are unstoppable unless we turn around.  Be still.  God is wide awake. Even those who think they are invincible can never usurp or manipulate His power.  Endure faithfully until the days are accomplished.

Vindication has no timeline discernible to us earthly creatures. That is the prerogative of the Supreme Power. It may take decades. Or it can happen in a flash.

Anonymous 

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