In her national day oration LSE’s Robtel Neajai Pailey spoke about the need to encourage a new type of active citizenship in Liberia. For this to succeed, write Jacien Carr and Aaron Weah, the country must shift from state-building to nation-building.
Libera’s Independence Day platform is used to troubleshoot national development and politics. In 1865, the “Father of Pan-Africanism”, Edward Wilmot Blyden spoke on Liberia’s “origins, dangers, and duties” In 2009, Chief Togbah Barworo delivered his speech in Kpelleh encouraging Liberians to embrace their traditions. In 2019, Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee declared post-war corruption as Liberia’s number one enemy.
In 2024, after Liberia’s fourth democratic elections, LSE Assistant Professor Robtel Neajai Pailey delivered Liberia’s 177 Independence Day’s address: A Radical Agenda for Re-imagining Liberia. Pailey’s proposition of radical change is anchored on re-imaging citizenship in post-war Liberia. Pailey proposes a triangular vision. In this triangular form are three levels of citizenship. One, she defines as passive—citizenship based on nationality. Two, active citizenship based on stature and status. The third category of citizenship is the one she describes as interactive.
In Pailey’s proposition for radical change, she imagines an interactive citizenship driven by values and principle and not a citizenship superficially constructed on nationality and status alone. Interactive citizenship introduces a consciousness of dignity and self-respect between the citizen and the government. Through this prism Pailey re-imagines national development, economic transformation as well as the mitigation of structural violence.
In 2021, Pailey published Development, (Dual) Citizenship and its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia. Her intervention on this subject is significant. Her approach interrogating how social upheavals and conflicts have redefined Liberian identities over time is important in “understanding why this change occurred and how we cope with it now is the beginning of re-imaging Liberia anew”. Here, Pailey establishes a roadmap that Liberians can implement to reconcile themselves with love and dignity while living in a state still in recovery
Liberia experienced extreme instability from 1989 to 2003 when the country weathered two civil wars and political chaos. Liberia is still a nation in recovery decades later. By contrast, it appears that neighbouring Sierra Leone and even more so Rwanda, have recuperated much better than Liberia from their conflicts.
According to Pailey, Liberia has not achieved a positive peace but a negative peace, a peace conceived without the absence of structural violence. Pailey explains that structural violence occurs when institutions “fuel inequality and injustice inhibit individuals from meeting their basic needs or actualising their fullest capabilities”. As Pailey states, this creates “unfreedoms”. There is incredible wealth disparity in Liberia, not because of economics but due to rapacious corruption that respects no bounds.
On the concept of statehood vs nationhood Pailey was generous. She defined state-building as the reform and regulation of citizens behaviour and attitude whereas nation-building is the relationship between the governed and governed. She argued, and rightfully so, that Liberian governments have focused “almost exclusively on state-building” and less on nation-building. State-building invests in roads, government buildings, and other physical infrastructure of so-called national pride and prestige. State-building is akin to the historiography focused solely on big-man-history, neglecting the history of the people. For a country wrecked by civil war for over a decade, state building in Liberia has meant never-ending grandiose road construction projects while there is no emergency roadside services to help motorists who crash on those roads. State-building in Liberia means erecting magnificent buildings without plumbing or a reliable electrical grid system. These offices have no air conditioning and for the toilets; a bucket of water and gravity is the solution. These projects have been subject to very lenient accountability processes creating countless avenues for corruption.
By contrast, nation building, or ‘peoplehood’, invests in building the Liberian people. In this model the focus would be on investing in maternal health, health care, education, security, training educators, investing in trade schools, community colleges, the University of Liberia, Cottington College, and establishing scholarship that allow Liberians to become nurses, nurse practitioners, epidemiologists, medical doctors, and pharmacists.
Peoplehood invests in ambulances with trained emergency medical technicians, to attend to injured motorists who crash on these grandiose roads projects. However, in this context of peoplehood, Pailey overlooked a small detail in her schema of interactive citizenship. After conflict, complex personalities are constructed, some of which are in direct contradiction to the notion of citizenship. In armed conflict victims are robbed of their dignity, making them less of a citizen. In part, their search for reparations as a means of prompt remedy and social repair is aimed at restoring this lost citizenship. This is by extension a request to the state to aid the process from victimhood to full citizenship. Pailey’s call for a more transparent process over the constitution of the war and economic crimes court, failed to be coherent in a broader campaign for the full implementation of the TRC Report which would otherwise set in motion an actual nation-building endeavour, a process when executed to the expectations of the general public would reestablish a strong bond between the state and citizens.
Some will argue that this peoplehood thing will never happen. But as Dr Pailey audaciously reminded Liberians throughout her National Oration: Dignity must define us.
Photo credit: Government of Liberia
