Liberia News: Boakai Did Not Make 119 Promises

By: Moses M. Tokpah

Liberia-The Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs and Tourism (MICAT) has denied that at no time President Joseph Boakai ever made 119 promises to the Liberian people as stated in NAYMOTE’s report.

National Youth Movement for Transparent Election (NAYMOTE) recently reported that the Boakai’s Administration has fulfilled 3% of the 119 promises it made to the people of Liberia.

But the Deputy Minister of Information, Daniel Sando said the President did not make 119 promises to the people of Liberia, but he rather made policy and vision statements, arguing that any policy statements expressed in presidential vision are not personal promises as in his words ‘some civil society groups would have the Liberian people believe.’

Minister Sando said the NAYMOTE report is meant to paint the distorted picture of the progress that the government continues to make.

According to him, when President Boakai makes a declaration that the government must achieve certain thing, he is rallying the nation around a cause and such statement cannot be construed as a personal promised made by him.

“He does not make a personal or private promise, the statement he made as such cannot be used to evaluate him as a person or the government capacity to deliver,” Daniel Sando stated.

He said President Boakai and the government’s capacity and effectiveness to deliver must be evaluated based on the ARREST’s Agenda for inclusive development, and not any other ‘so-called statement or declaration’ that is being attributed to the government.

Mr. Sando indicated that the ARREST’s Agenda is being fully developed into the national development plan for Liberia and the Minister of Finance is leading such effort as the plan is still being developed.

He explained that the President’s vision for the country is reflected in the ARREST’s Agenda for inclusive development

The Minister asserted that in Liberia it appears to be a trend towards negativity against the image of the government, and people come across as presenting the government as lacking focus and productivity.

Minister Sando said anyone who says they are evaluating President Boakai on ‘imaging’ 119 promises, it means they are starting on a wrong footing. He continued: “President Boakai did not make 119 promises so he cannot be held to someone else’s imagination. To describe policy and vision statements as promises is misleading and deliberately deceptive.”

The Minister furthered that when candidate is vying for the presidency, they run their bid to lead the country; express a vision, and an imagine feature in which they want to see the country, noting that they see the present difficulty and declare that said difficulty can be solved.

He added that things can be done in different ways when the people give the candidate the chance to take mantle of authority, and in the case of President Boakai, that’s how it is.

He accused NAYMOTE of making a report sometimes ago on the President’s 100 days deliverables in which it mentioned that the county meet had been completed.

Minister Sando mentioned that the indicator of the completion of said deliverable used by the group was that the date had been set for the county meet, but interestingly the county meet was already concluded on May 6^th, and the report was released on May 13^th.

He said the government believes that because the institution has some donor pressure, it has to release all kind of reports that have no substance just to convince its donor partners.

He accused some media institutions of having vested interests in painting the government negative, running with empty report without seeking to validate how substantive these reports can be.

Sando challenged to balance their reporting, adding that the NAYMOTE does not state any working definition of what it called promises in the report.