‘Malaria Drove Me To Opposition’

-Sen. Coleman Begs CDC For Mercy

By Jackson C. Clay, Jr.

Grand Kru County Senator, Dr. Peter Coleman says it was not his intention to leave the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) in the past, but it was malaria that took over his head that made him leave the party.

Speaking over the weekend at the CDC headquarters in Congo Town, outside Monrovia when he decided to rejoin the party, Senator Coleman branded himself as a prodigal son of the CDC and it was time that he returns home.

“I am a prodigal son, a son that was part and parcel from the beginning of this party, but I don’t know, maybe that malaria got my head and I went the other way. But distinguish partisans, I have come back home and I am moved by the reception that you have given this prodigal son,” Senator Coleman voiced.

Senator Coleman asserted that before people used to laugh at partisans of the CDC and branding them with all sorts of names, adding that those same very people who used to do that are all now members of the CDC and as such it was necessary for him to come back home to his party.

The former Minister of health and a renowned medical doctor indicated that the CDC won the 2005 and 2011 elections in the country but was forcibly taken away from the party due to what he called recognition in the international community.

“I have come back home strengthened, more energized and ready to fight this battle. Before then, it was a battle we were fighting for recognition, when nobody knew us and we won election here and they took it from us. This time around is not about that but it is about fostering development and changing the status of the Liberian people,” Dr. Coleman stressed.

He noted that the Pro-Poor agenda was what they all saw in the past and decided to join the CDC, thus, had the country been governed by the CDC since that time to present, the country would have been far way better than what it is today.

The Grand Kru county senator comments come barely one year away from the mid-term Senatorial elections in the country and he would be seeking re-election in his county.

It can be recalled that Senator Coleman came to the legislature on the ticket of the CDC but later resigned from the party some few years back upon a probe by the party about an alleged corruption allegedly carried out by the Senator.

It was discovered that Senator Coleman, while serving as senator of Grand Kru County and chairman of the Senate committee on Health was receiving addition pay from government for services he was rendering at the medical school of the University of Liberia, something which prompted the party’s intervention to probe the Senator.

Meanwhile, Senator Coleman was highly welcomed back into the CDC by its chairman, Mulbah Morlu who then appointed the Senator on a committee to spearhead the construction of the party’s headquarters across the country.

Meanwhile, a veteran Liberian journalist has frowned on Senator Coleman for his recent revelation that he Coleman suffered from ‘mental illness in time past’, which led him to take a crucial political decision, which he now regrets.

According to W. Eric Davis, Sr., the disclosure by Sen. Coleman is not only a tacit proof of how comically dishonest dome politicians can be, in their wild and insatiable greed for power, fame and patronage, through dry-faced lies, deceit and voters’ manipulations.

Davis who has over 30 years of practice and experiences in the Liberian news media sector furthers that, the public, through the Press and Civil Society, must take the self-confession of past mental contamination by the Grand Kru lawmaker, as a grave national development. “Now, if the senator can tell the public his one-time decision to withdraw his membership and support from the then opposition Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), was due to a mental illness, it is very possible that his functions in the Senate have also been adversely affected, thus robbing those who voted him into the post, of their share of the national benefits,” Davis said.

Davis, an immediate past Editorial Consultant at the independent Public Agenda Newspaper in Monrovia, believes that it is the right of the public, to demand that Sen. Peter Coleman be made to present a ‘certified’ bill of health that he is in fact ‘mentally stable.’

“We cannot be paying huge salary and other benefits, to elected or appointed officials of government, who are clinically unfit for the job,” Journalist Davis continued, and wants the civil society community to petition the leadership of the Senate to mandate that Sen. Coleman sees a psychiatrist and present a subsequent bill of health.

Meanwhile, Davis is also calling on Liberians to begin to reject unscrupulous politicians, who are ‘good for nothing,’ but to deceive, lie and manipulate them.