Most citizens who opposed government’s surrender of Liberia’s only culture center, Kendeja, to Billionaire Bob Johnson to build a 4-star hotel have asserted, amongst other things, that the deal was a gross disrespect for, if not desecration of, Liberia’s cultural heritage.

Supporters of the deal countered that modernization and globalization spinning in the air, as well as the cash value they bear, carry with them virtues that culture or heritage can hardly match.

The latter arguers won, not necessarily on the strength of logic but on the power of political authority. And in a spontaneous manner, the inhabitants of Kendeja, women and children, were torpedoed out; courtesy of the Mighty Dollar, to which many proponents of the deal are seemingly obsessed.

But before the first brick touched the soil of what used to be the only surviving culture center of the nation, hell broke loose. The team of pro-hotel architects has cracked. At least one is announced severed. Suspicion is high that more await liquidation.

The Analyst Staff Writer takes a look at the implications of both the Kendeja deal and the brouhaha that it is triggering.

Some might call it a superstitious belief, but there are others who are conjecturing that the ancestors of the native land have begun to rise up in anger against what they consider desecration of the nation’s cultural heritage.

The deal that gave the piece of land what used to be called Kendeja Culture Center to an American billionaire to construct a four-star hotel has left a horde of physical and psychological injuries not only on Liberia’s deportment on cultural values, but also on the social well-being of the people who inhabited it.

Bob Johnson, the American Billionaire who took interest in the picturesque situation of Kendeja, won the hearts and minds of government officials with a huge investment in the country’s tourism business.

He intends to build a four-star hotel, according to government sources, at Kendeja which lies inches away from the scenery Atlantic Ocean beach along the Roberts International Airport and Monrovia, Liberia’s capital.

Government, caught in the throes of massive public expectation to deliver on its many campaign promises, apparently sees the Bob Johnson investment as grease to its elbow since it would help balloon state revenue intakes and provide employment opportunity for citizens.

These social and economic baits have apparently blinded the government and proponents of the deal to the extent that they have flagrantly ignored other vexing imperatives.

As soon as the window of opportunity was slightly opened, the government rushed for the bait, accepting the Billionaire’s request to take over Kendeja without considering that the village had long been the sole hub of Liberia’s cultural artistry.

Opposition grew against the deal from citizens who thought that government was putting pecuniary gains or the Mighty Dollar above the sanctity of Liberian heritage. Both the government and zealots of modernity and globalization retorted that Liberia could not afford to forego a four-star hotel investment for a culture center they describe archaic and “un-modernized”.

But as critics insisted on respect for Liberian culture, the government quickly announced that there were plans to dislocate the culture center to a more “civilized” or “modernized” premises.

However the irony and unnaturalness of “modernizing” the culture center, no such promise was translated into reality until the government, through the Ministry of Information, began to evict the residents out of Kendeja at odd hours of the night.

Following a nocturnal meeting, which adjourned with threats of immediate forceful eviction of residents, the inhabitants went amok immediately, taking to their heels in search of alternative homes.

There were reports that some of the fleeing Kendeja residents, mostly women and children, sought refuge in church compounds along the Monrovia-RIA route and in makeshift huts akin to wartime displaced centers.

Under the relocation theory of the Kendeja hotel deal was also the school problem, the fate of children and youth whose only source of learning was a public school located in Kendeja.

The Kendeja High School, according to an administrator of the school, hosted nearly 2,000 students, who were evicted from the school to give way for the construction of a 4-star hotel.

Officials of the schools also told The Analyst that the relocation of the school to a cramped up alternative building was as spontaneous and coercive as the dismantlement of the whole of Kendeja and the eviction of its inhabitants.

“One day the Minister of Information came by and said you are leaving this campus tomorrow at all cost to a new building,” one school authority said.

“And that was it. We could not wait to pack all that the school possesses; and we could not bring everything because there wasn’t enough space in this new school referred to as a transit facility to another one that is supposedly under construction. Consequently, most of our important belongings were left behind or scattered all over the place.”

First-hand visit at the building which government says it temporarily provided in the place of Kendeja-based Kendeja High School can highly hold half the displaced student population.

 “You can see; you can see for yourself,” said a classroom teacher in an interview. “Not only is this new site wanting of basic sanitation, it is woefully too small to hold not only all the students but the faculty and administration as well. This transit school is a whole mess.”

The transit school, as some officials call it, does not have toilet facilities, adequate classrooms and other essential academic requirements. The government, through the Minister of Information, Lawrence Bropleh promised the cite was just temporary and that an adequate academic facility was under construction.

Kendeja school authorities told The Analyst that Blopleh promised the school would have moved from transition to a permanent cite following the long Census break, a promise that still remains on the shelve.

It seems the irking transitional conditions facing the school, particular students, triggered a protest march that later turned violent, according to sources, when state police attempted tear-gassing and bullying the demonstrating students.

Tens of commercial and other vehicles plying the Monrovia-RIA route on Tuesday were forced to ground for hours. Other reports say a number of protesting students were arrested and jailed while at least one top police officer is nursing wounds from missiles exchanged with students.

The costs and casualties of the stampede notwithstanding, President Sirleaf intervened, first by lending ears to the students’ grievances and, second, by fulfilling a promise to the students and a threat to wrongdoers in the Kendeja saga that heads on roll.

Speaking to the students and urging calm, President Sirleaf sounded petrified by hearing the appalling conditions of the Kendeja students, saying that she was misinformed, or probably 4-1-9ed, by officials of the Ministry of Information. She promised that heads would roll if Information Minister Bropleh, who was out of the country during her encounter with the students, returned.   

True to her words, heads have begun to roll. However, nearly 144 hours after the Presidents’ head-will-roll threat, it is only one that has rolled so far; the head of a junior minister, Assistant Information Minister for Culture Jailee Quiee.

Giving reason for the Quiee’s dismissal by the President in a hastily arranged press conference, Information Minister Bropleh was evasive, only saying that Quiee had been the only contact person of government in the Kendeja school relocation project.

Then the Minister said, “If the President says I misinformed her, then it is because the contracting firm misinformed me.” But Minister Bropleh who is a signatory to the deal and is the principal vice juror of the President is off the hooks. Education Ministry officials also seconded to the building project are yet to be axed.

Without being definitive on reasons why Quiee was dismissed by President Sirleaf, Minister Bropleh told reporters that a three-man committee has been put in place to ascertain circumstances leading to the controversial dismissal, the delay of works on the relocated school and the poor quality of materials being used on the new school facility.

The committee includes Catholic Justice and Peace Commission Director Augustine Toe, General Services Agency Director William Russell and an Informational Ministry official Gabriel Williams.  Bropleh could not say why he isn’t part of the committee nor immediate target of President Sirleaf’s head-will-roll dragnet since he is a major player both in the 4-star hotel deal and its auxiliary implications of relocation.       

Analysts have been quick in pointing out that Quiee is but a sacrificial lamb in the Kendeja saga, where the government, including President Sirleaf, is held culpable for desecrating a revered Liberian habitat and flushing its inhabitants into the wilderness.

“From start to finish, this entire government acted wrongly, and more so inhumanely, not only to the sanctity of Liberian values but also to its own citizens; all because of the mighty dollar,” said J. Prince Jackson, classroom teacher at Joel Preparatory Junior High School in Gardnersville.

“The government ignored and squashed all public outcries against what I will call the invasion of our cultural heritage and privacy of our compatriots, including women and children, who have made this area their home for so many years.

"We have vast empty land in this country, so beautiful and so promising for all kinds of investment opportunities. But the one piece of land hosting our only culture heritage is the only good and scenery one that our leaders say can attract investment, provide employment and give us more revenues.”

“Our ancestors will fight back for this desecration and for the suffering we are undergoing,” said a Kendeja resident, an astute culturist who does not want to be named. “Confusion has entered their camp and they don’t even know where to throw their axes. But at the end of the day, Liberian heritage will prevail over political demigods and economic scavengers.”