On October 10, 2017, Liberians will wake up with the hope of making a turning point decision, which will forever go down in our history as a country. Any candidate elected during the process will decide the fate of Liberia and Liberians for the next six to twelve years.

It is therefore incumbent upon every Liberian to carefully scrutinize every candidate before voting.

In his memoir, “There was a Country,” Chinua Achebe cautioned his fellow writers not to be complacent but to move to where the action is. He said the “writer should be on the sidelines with his notepad and pen, where he can observe with objectivity.”

He warned that the African “writer who steps aside can only write footnotes or a glossary when the event is over.”

I have followed with keen interest and listened to speeches, campaign messages, and policies of some of the presidential candidates and have come to realize that Liberty Party’s Charles Walker Brumskine is just pursuing a personal dream of being president of Liberia, but he has no good intention for the country.

Brumskine is one of the best lawyers Liberia has produced in terms of his long service and his impact. However, as the chief architect of the much talked about Congo-native divide, the Liberty Party standard bearer is not competent to lead Liberia.

My grandfather once told me that the first to throw a stone is most of the time not noticed by the public but attention comes to the one who retaliates.

Of late, I have watched the political scene and I have heard some people attributing the Congo-native divide statement to Unity Party’s Joseph Boakai, forgetting the architect of the statement.

Serving as the president pro-tempore of the Liberian Senate during former President Charles Taylor’s regime, Brumskine made a prior divisive statement that was captured in a letter of complaint written on February 3, 1998 against him by the late Margibi Sen. Bedell Fahn and addressed to Vice President Enoch Dogolea [The Bush Chicken previously wrote about the episode].

The letter was a clear indication that Brumskine is a key promoter of the Congo-native divide. In his letter of complaint, Fahn quoted the Liberty Party flag-bearer as saying, “Who is a Fahn to deny a Townsend from traveling from Liberia? Your native people killed her husband in 1980 and you too, a native man, is denying her the chance to travel.”

Agitated by Brumskine’s divisive statement, Fahn replied with insults, “Get your stupid self from my office, you fool.”  The “learned lawyer” again responded, “I will make sure to remove you from this committee and get at you, you country fool. We got our country back now, damn country fool!”

I am told that Fahn lost his position on the committee later that year. Other sources (no documentary evidence) have hinted that the Liberty Party Standard Bearer refused (in most instances) to sit in session on grounds that it was presided over by a “country man,” which at the time was Dogolea.

This has not been discussed much and some of the radio stations that are noted for blowing trumpet on other politicians like George Weah and others have since ceased to talk about Brumskine and his divisive statement but rather focused on airing statement made by supporters of Boakai.

With such record to his credit, what more can the Liberty Party Standard Bearer say to the Liberian people about reconciliation? Brumskine is only fighting for what he thinks belongs to him, which is his farm, Liberia, and not what he can do for Liberia.

The late Félix Houphouët-Boigny advised Ivoirians many years ago against electing Laurent Gbagbo as president of Cote d’Ivoire. He made this appeal when he observed that Gbagbo was showing some symptoms of desperateness akin to that of what we see today in Brumskine.

Ivoirians harvested the fruit of their stubbornness when Gbagbo came to power years after Houphouët-Boigny was dead and gone.

Liberians should learn from the mistakes of the Ivorians and not take Brumskine’s past statements lightly.

Featured photo courtesy of Lloyd Massah