Monrovia, Liberia – Dear Ambassador, McCarthy:
I appreciated your assistance and respected the effort you had done over the years in Liberia.
Regarding the conclusion of your three-week county tours in Liberia, I am writing in response to your recent press release on April 24, 2023.
In your most recent message, you addressed a number of problems with poor leadership and ethical violations in particular fields in those countries. I’m thrilled that you went to some of the remote parts of Liberia, and I appreciate the personal encounters with our people and the hands-on training.
Mr. Ambassador, while I concur with you on some of the points you made in your statement regarding a lack of accountability, the misappropriation of public funds and donor funds, poor governance, and other actions that impede our nation’s development, I must admit that I am frustrated by these revelations, as you obviously are, and any rational person would be as well.
However, in my opinion, your annoyance completely overcame you to the point where you attempted to right the wrong or evil by purposefully combining the undesirable fruits with the desirable fruits.
The agony and difficulty of trying to generalize the entire legislature is something you can only begin to imagine. Your opinion is flawed.
The fact that you claimed there was no need for alarm to be raised and that a legislative syndicate with players involved spent 65 million dollars feathering its own nests shows how deeply your sorrow and resentment permeated your being.
Let me declare absolutely that the budget we passed was never 65 million. Secondly, the 40 million plus that was passed was not for the 30 senators and 73 representatives, but rather for the nearly 4000 staff members in central administration and all of the legislative staffers for each member.
Additionally, funds received legitimately for operations cannot be cruel when your own nation has funds allocated to congressmen and congresswomen for operations, with the exception that in your nation, the people want policies and laws, whereas in our nation, the people want projects that will have a legislative influence. Your broad categorization of the legislature resulted from your failure to examine those legislative engagements money, the more than 4,000 central administration staff employees, as well as individual members staff members.
Do not be misled; there are absolutely evil and corrupt persons in the legislature, just as there are members who oppose corruption, the theft of public funds, and the ineffective use of parliamentary allotments. As a democratic institution, the legislature does not always enact budgets that are unanimously endorsed by its members.
We fought hard for this before you arrived in Liberia, especially among the parliamentarians who shared our views. Your generalization not only harmed or weakened us; it was also meant to thwart our efforts and ruin our public reputations in the eyes of our citizens despite all the sacrifices we had made.
Even in the Western Bible, there was blood from a lamb on the doorpost to distinguish the righteous from the wicked before a plague could appear in the shadows.
The people who raised these alarms in the legislature, denounced corruption and malpractices, and looked to you for support when those alarms were raised have been annihilated in your case, though.
