Monrovia, Liberia – In collaboration with NAYMOTE-Liberia, Liberian academic, entrepreneur, policy expert, and educator Mory Sumaworo led a Working Group on Ethical Leadership, Mentorship, and Political Integrity with the goal of creating practical suggestions. The program was jointly hosted by the Governance Commission and organized under the them: Intergenerational Dialogue on Strengthening Accountability in Democratic Governance in Liberia.
In order to ascertain how Liberia can improve moral leadership, generational mentoring, and integrity in its body politics for the ultimate goals of politics national development, peace, shared economic prosperity, and human rights protection the working group brought together both seasoned and up-and-coming leaders. Dr. Sumaworo divided his group into the following divisions in order to get a systemic result, as shown in the accompanying image below.
The sections include: Section (1) Ethical Leadership, Section (2) Political Integrity, Section (3) Accountability
Section (4) Youth Participation and Section (5) Mentorship. It was therefore concluded by the Working Group that “Ethical leadership and political integrity in Liberia will not come from policies alone- she has no shortage of laws, regulation, and policies, there is a need enforce, reenforce and continue executing the law it will come from leaders, institutions and communities who must choose integrity, mentorship, and accountability every day to have that practical connections between procedural democracy and substantive democracy”
The working session concluded that in Liberia, corruption, a lack of accountability, partiality, lack of openness, and lack of faith in institutions all threaten ethical leadership and political integrity. In light of mistrust, lack of established platforms, structure of power, and lack of deliberate investment in new leaders or succession planning, mentoring between generations is still inadequate. The team concluded that it will need ongoing mentoring, ethical education, merit-based leadership, more robust accountability frameworks, and a common dedication to public service to strengthen political integrity in Liberia.
