Liberia: CDC Constitutes Concessions Committee

Soccer-star George Weah's CDC is Liberia's top opposition party

The opposition Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) has announced the setting up of an 11-person working group on concessions, contracts and agreements.

The committee, the CDC said, is mandated to draw up a strategic advocacy mechanism and schematic technical analysis necessary to ensure that the Liberian government is held accountable in the nation’s resource sector protection  against waste, fraud and abuse.

The party quoted the recently released LEITI commissioned audit report as saying that “almost all of the $8 billion worth of resource contracts signed by Liberia since 2009 have violated” the laws. The report, released by the government of Liberia last week, was conducted by an international auditing firm, Moore Stephens International.

The CDC said it was “rudely awakened by this unpleasant reality of uncontrolled graft and [incidence] of widespread irregularities in the resource sector, a tragedy that certainly erects a [serious] roadblock to the provision of basic social services to an already over vulnerable population.”

In a statement issued yesterday, the CDC national chairman, George G. Solo, said the party’s 11-person  working committee on concessions-contracts & agreements will be chaired by the party’s vice chairman, Mulbah Morlu.

The Committee is expected to analyze scenarios, reports and concession-centered agreements and make recommendations for institutional political and or legal actions to safeguard the collective interests of the masses, the party said.

According to Mr. Solo, the  committee, as part of its mandate, is authorized to continuously articulate the party’s uncompromising stance against the apportionment of Wologisi to O.P Jindal group of India. While the CDC would never antagonize investment opportunities for Liberians, it, however, believes entering an agreement to grant Jindal Group the right to mine Wologizi at this time, “with well over 60 agreements passed on the premise of huge legal discrepancies, without the protection of the public interest, renders the plan a complete scam engineered by selfish political bargaining.”