The political elites are Africa’s problem 

By Francis Kokutse, in Accra, Ghana 

Francis Kokutse is a journalist based in Accra and writes for Associated Press (AP), University World News, as well as Science and Development.Net. He was a Staff Writer of African Concord and Africa Economic Digest in London, UK.

It is becoming clear that those whose responsibility it is to take Africa out of its travails are exactly those who are pushing the people into the doldrums of poverty and want. In fact, Africans should not be in the position the continent finds itself if the political elite will just do what is right. Sadly, they don’t, and that is exactly what Michael A. McCarthy, the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Liberia, found out about the elite in the country during his diplomatic tour of duty. His findings are not limited to Liberia because any serious watcher of the continent’s politics will find the same problem all over Africa.

McCarthy painted a gloomy picture of how the political elite have badly treated the poor people of Liberia. If you leave out Liberia in his press statement, everything he said fits the rest of Africa. For instance, he said just $500,000 per year of actual maintenance (not make-believe budgeted funds) on each of four unpaved roads (Zorzor–Voinjama; Zwedru–Fishtown; Greenville – Barclayville City; and Greenville – Buchanan) would dramatically improve the lives of more than a million of Liberia’s poorest citizens. Isn’t this exactly what we see all over Africa? No proper budget is made to repair roads, especially those in the rural areas.

He didn’t mince words in his assessment of Liberia’s situation and said, if the political elite could consider, “lowering food costs, revolutionising farm to market access, and eliminating seasonal shortages of life-saving medicines and equipment, the legislature would still have $43 million a year to somehow get by.”

Going by what he said, anyone who goes round the continent will find that food prices have been on the increase, and this is due to the fact that access to food production centres have been ignored.

For all that he has seen in Liberia, McCarthy says if the U.S Congress should ask him how the elite in Monrovia treated destitute citizens in the leeward counties, his honest response would have to be, “those citizens are treated with a neglect that borders on contempt. Is this the best that Liberia can do?” he posed, and any serious African should agree with him because the people on the continent deserve better, not the poor deal that the political elite have been dishing out to them?

From his narrative, he said he spent three weeks visiting a number of counties in the southwest of the country, and by that covered every corner of the country. He found resilience on the part of the people but, unfortunately, on the trip he “was startled and deeply troubled to encounter multiple county hospitals that received not one penny of what they were promised in the 2022 budget.  Hospitals on which lives depend, where outbreaks are prevented and suffering is alleviated, did not receive any portion of the US$100,000 or more appropriated by the legislature for them to operate.”

McCarthy said these facilities currently survive on the backs of incredibly dedicated health professionals, making do with whatever they can scrape together. Like the rest of the continent, this eye-opening trip showed that neglect was not the work of one political party.  “The blocking of resources is so complete that it must be institutional: and the lack of any alarm being raised indicates a syndicate involving players at the legislature, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” he added.

Is there any African country that does not have this problem of neglect by the political elite who are only  interested in how much they can amass? Throughout Africa, there are instances where projects intended to help solve problems like accommodation, health, and education, have been either abandoned or left to ruin. What is sad is instances where some of these projects have been completed but will not be put to use because a politician was not ready to perform the ceremonial opening. What seems to have appalled McCarthy is the fact that in one town, “administrators look with anticipation mixed with fear at the brand-new, modern hospital that sits vacant, knowing that they can barely keep the existing makeshift facility going, and running the new one will require ten times the resources.”

Amidst pain, he said the  United States Government is about to spend over $40 million constructing Liberia’s state-of-the-art National Reference Laboratory (NRL) that, when completed, will require $3 million to $4 million a year from the Government of Liberia to operate. Sadly, he asked the question, “If the government is failing to deliver statutory appropriations of only $100,000 to existing hospitals, why would we ever trust annual pledges of $3 million for the future NRL?”

He said he paid visits to the County Service Centres, and in 2022, none had received any of their budget allocation (usually around $13,333). Adding that, “One Centre has not printed marriage certificates for four years because the printer broke, and their last allocation was received five years ago. Virtually all of them, beautifully electrified over the past two years with UNDP-supplied solar power systems (costing around $35,000 – $40,000 each), and amply staffed by (mostly) salaried employees in tidy buildings, are reduced to the job of middlemen.”

So, what these workers had been reduced to is forwarding paperwork to the capital, Monrovia periodically for time-consuming processing, McCarthy said, stating that, “their plight makes a mockery of decentralisation efforts.  The one functioning office in every centre, the Liberia Revenue Authority (LRA), has representatives who collect duties and regularly forward funds to Monrovia – apparently a one-way street.”

Like the situation in all other African countries, it struck him that the further he went from the capital, the more elaborate and explicit were the reasons given for the lack of funding from the central government.

What has become the refrain from African leaders for their inaction, is shouting hoarse that times are rough in addition to the latest mantra of “Oh, Putin’s war has made everything more difficult.”  “Prices have dried up the budgets.”  “You donor partners must fill the gaps,” were all McCarthy heard and he wondered if these people were aware that, much to their credit, the Liberia Revenue Authority (LRA) has surpassed projections and increased revenues for the past four years, climbing from $435,682 million in 2019 to $605,005 million in 2022.

He suspected that people in the rural areas were not even aware that, Liberian economy grew by 3.7 percent in 2022.  In addition, he wondered if the people were also told that the legislature has spent more every year for the past three years buttering their own bread, allocating over $65 million in 2022 for salaries and operations. Unfortunately, these were happening at a time when hospitals went without, “and service centres withered on the vine, the 30 senators and the 73 representatives spent sixty-five million U.S. dollars feathering their own nests.” That is Africa’s story!

It is painful for McCarthy to note that, the U.S. Embassy withheld 25 percent of the salaries of their Liberian employees at the Residence and at the Embassy to pay their legally mandated income tax to the LRA, the much better-paid representatives and senators are not paying a full 25 percent of their salaries. He questioned why “legislators and ministers, those living on the top of the heap, are given annual duty-free imports that deny the LRA much-needed additional revenue.”

For McCarthy, it does not make sense that the U.S. taxpayers continue to spend around $60 million a year on health care in Liberia, and another $23 million on education. The same legislature that spent $65 million on itself in 2022 appropriated around $7.1 million for grants and subsidies to county health facilities and $2.76 million for operations at basic and secondary education though, it has been shown that these funds do not reach their intended destinations!

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