Tuesday was yet another faceoff between students of the University of Liberia and officers of the Liberia National Police (LNP), as the Vanguard Student Unification Party (SUP) staged a defiant protest to present a 10-count petition to the administration of President Joseph N. Boakai on what it terms the rampant and unbearable crises of jobs and justice.
According to SUP, its petition draws inspiration from the lived realities and quotidian experiences of their fellow compatriots, as it is the written and verbal articulation of thousands of university graduates, as well as those from technical and vocational institutions who roam the streets in search of jobs that are nonexistent. “Our petition represents Liberians in Cambodia who are suffocating from the trials of a foreign land; it represents the millions of Liberians who live in multidimensional poverty. Our petition speaks for the 35.5% of Liberians who are undernourished and the 26.9% of children below the age of five who suffer from stunted growth. We recognize, with tragic clarity, that the superabundance of crises in Liberia cannot be reduced to individual moral failing alone, but to a structural paralysis whose logic is that economic, institutional and governance institutions should serve the interest of an elite minority instead of the vast majority of the ordinary people,” SUP stated in its petition.
In its ten (10) counts, SUP demanded that the Government of the Republic of Liberia, led by Joseph Nyuma Boakai and Jeremiah Koung, immediately design, publish and implement a comprehensive, transparent, non-partisan, time-bound strategy for meaningfully employing thousands of Liberians with a monthly salary of at least US$500 United States or its Liberian dollar equivalence, providing loans to thousands of emerging entrepreneurs as a means of developing the skills of young Liberians.
The student movement requested that all sectors of the Liberian economy, including mining, logging, agriculture, fisheries and banks, be immediately nationalized and turned over to the state so that it would facilitate job creation and provide the space for building schools, roads, hospitals and other critical infrastructure.
SUP also demanded that the salaries of the President, the Vice-President, the Speaker, the Pro-Tempore, the Chief Justice, representatives, senators, ministers, heads of SOEs and every other high-earning public official be immediately and drastically reduced by 50%, and that the salaries of civil servants, teachers, doctors, nurses and personnel of the Armed Forces of Liberia be immediately increased by that same proportion.
The party emphasized that the Government of Liberia (GOL) must obey the Maputo Declaration in its next budget cycle by allocating at least 10% of the national budget to agriculture, thereby providing thousands of jobs and curbing the challenge of food insecurity and extreme hunger.
It further called on the government to respect the Liberianization policy by protecting Liberian farmers, especially Liberian rubber-exporting companies against the foreign interest of Jetty and his criminal accomplices in the government.
The party insisted that all cases involving alleged violations of human rights, including incidents of violence or abuse against citizens, be investigated promptly and transparently, with those responsible held accountable in accordance with the law.
In its seventh count, SUP demanded the Boakai-Koung regime to immediately put an end to the politically-motivated removal of Montserrado County’s district #10 Representative, Yekeh Korlubah, or risk mass citizen action.
SUP warned that its petition should not be mistaken for rhetoric or a ceremonial appeal to authority, but a substantive intervention grounded in the lived realities of the Liberian people, pointing out that the party is not an adversary to the state but a critical voice within the democratic space, committed to accountability, equity and national advancement.
The protest was held on Capitol Hill, but was short-lived when the students met the stiff resistance of LNP officers who used lethal weapons to disperse the gathering. The police shot rounds of tear-gas, chased the protestors and arrested some of them, including Foday Massaquoi, head of the CDC-COP.
Meanwhile, several civil society and human rights activists have condemned the police for disrupting a peaceful protest and brutalizing the protestors.
