Part II: 10 Reasons Why Madam Sirleaf Is Witch-hunting Grand Gedeans

By Gibson W. Jerue

PART II:

The True Whig Party minority regime had been cut off; Madam Sirleaf’s godfathers and political mentors were being arrested, thirteen of them killed in cold blood; her chopping spot was snatched away; She walked a few distance toward the grave but was returned by the mercy of Samuel Doe, and now she is in full blown politics again. It is 1983, Nimba raid that she personally engineered with her strange bed fellow, Thomas Quiwonkpa, taking the center stage. General Robert Saye was killed by his own Nimba people on Quiwonkpa parents’ farm road, and Ellen gets a setback. The thought raced through her head that this little “Krahn rat” is proving too tough.

Meanwhile, she was active with the formation of a political party, the Liberia Action Party; the party that will win her a senatorial seat that she rejected. In early 1984 she began a campaign of bad mouthing the PRC regime, using Samuel Doe as the pillar of her vicious campaign. Doe was the witch-hunter, he was barbaric, he was draconian, and he was everything but human being. This first time I have ever heard a person insulting a sitting president came from Madam Sirleaf in mid-1984, when she described Samuel Doe as “a fool presiding over a regime of ignoramus”. 

Shortly after her insults, and branding of Doe as the most brutal president Liberia had ever seen, she was arrested and detained. In jailed Ellen claimed to John Vambo, who was then working for the Daily Observer, that she was “tortured by Krahn soldiers” sent by Doe. What gave Ellen the guts to believe that every soldier in the Armed Forces of Liberia in 1984 was a Krahn man is what beat my imagination. But that was the germination of a long payback plan that she hatched.

In journalism, names make news. In fact it is one of the eight major elements of news—prominence. If a political heavy weight like Madam Sirleaf branded the AFL soldiers as Krahn soliders, it meant so much for the little man who saw her as a mentor, a god. What she tried to do was to escalate political characterization of the army to lose its relevance. And she succeeded. Liberians took her words for it. In the end, she achieved her objective to render the entire Krahn ethnic group as a criminal sect backing a monster who she believed was bent on “witch-hunting” Nimbaians.

Now the seed of hatred that started when she was arrested but released by Doe, the snatching of her daily bread as Minister of Finance, and the bringing down of the government of her godfathers, was now rearing its head. She was looking at the regime as a Krahn regime rather than that of a group represented by members of the various ethnic groups. She introduced what today turned out to be “Krahn people killed Gios and Manos…” The instigation inflamed and Ellen ran the four corner of the earth calling for sanction against the Doe government.