buylotrogold

Preparing for Mourning By Tarty Teh Mr. Gabriel Baccus Matthews has denied warning the Milton Teahjay family to produce the missing Teahjay or be prepared to mourn.  Yet Matthews has not said exactly what he told the Teahjay family which has given them renewed cause for alarm.  But a statement that appears to be the closest thing to a direct quotation from Matthews is as follows: ''Mr. Matthews told the Analyst [newspaper, 4/13/01] that he was not interested in the Teahjay case and was only acting in conformity with the basic norms of the law, adding 'My action was only for legal reason.' '' Let's forget about any legal basis Matthews has cited for meeting with the Teahjay family and for later making a public statement in addition to some private warnings to the family.  I say this because I know as much about law as Matthews does, and that's next to nothing.  But the distressed Teahjay family may not be so circumspect about Matthews' motives or qualification in questioning them about Teahjay. There is one basic question: Who the hell is Gabriel Baccus Matthews?  My question may appear rhetorical, but it is not.  But any answers I provide will not be definitive; they can only describe a trend that will grow even more evident as we look at Matthews' history. The United States is not the best environment for rewarding laziness.  To be sure, lazy people can survive in the U.S. _base_d upon their level of competence in attracting and milking victims.  Such ability is often not strictly in keeping with the law, but may be difficult to prove as illegal.  There is, for instance, no law against living at the expense of friends and relatives.  Theft is a distinct possibility for people who will not work for any private enterprise but instead wait always for opening in, for instance, the Liberian government where theft is more of a standard practice. From the day his Liberian government scholarship ran out while in the U.S., Matthews has played every connection he had in any government.  A great-grandson of Liberian President James Spriggs Payne, Matthews had a great aunt (Georgia Payne Cooper) as Secretary of the Liberian Senate when in 1974 President William Tolbert got fed up with Matthews' arrogance and criminal behavior, and recommended that his salary as Vice Consul at our United Nations Mission be garnished to pay back the money he took from the Consulate's cash receipt. I did not see the ''nasty'' (or was it ''insulting'') letter Matthews said he wrote to President William Tolbert.  But I took his word for it that the letter was every bit as bad as Matthews claimed.  However, what I was unclear about was why Tolbert was the _object_ of Matthews' contempt.  I got the answer several months later when Moses Duopo and I met with then Foreign Minister C. Cecil Dennis Jr. who told us about the payment arrangement President Tolbert sought for replacing the money Matthews had taken. I am sticking with Matthews' own de_script_ion of both his means and justification for taking the money.  Matthews said he placed a receipt in the safe every time he took out the money he needed to pay his house rent and wages for the nanny who took care of the kids he and his non-working wife were raising.  (Matthews did not live in an apartment in New York City; he lived in a house, in 1974.  ''A house with green grass in backyard!'' Hillary Gibson, a fellow Liberian, said in disbelief.) But ''eating'' the money wasn't as blazon as that.  Matthews had some basis for some expectations in terms of means of replacing the money.  Matthews only started using the money when the government told him (after he complained) that he would get an upward adjustment to his salary.  The Tolbert government's offer of a pay raise for Matthews might not have been quite a deal yet, but it was enough of a basis for Matthews to start paying himself, perhaps retroactively.   What better way was there to ensure that the government would not renege on a promised raise in his salary than to start paying himself?  I might have been able to estimate the size of the raise Matthews expected if I knew exactly how much money he took from the Consulate coffers in its anticipation.  That's how President Tolbert got vexed (as we say in Liberia). However, it was Tolbert's reaction to Matthews' act that was unusual. ''Eating'' government money wasn't something Matthews invented.  He was merely raised on it.  So it was Tolbert who was flying in the face of tradition by questioning what, even by Liberian standards, could best qualify as low-grade theft, if you wanted to make a big issue of it as President Tolbert had.  All this was between 1973 and 1974.   Matthews was fired from his position as Vice Consul.  I can only guess that it was because he did not accept the plan the Tolbert government offered him toward restitution.  Matthews formed the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) in 1974.  A couple of years later, President Tolbert gave Matthews a grand tour of Liberia with the prospect of forming an opposition political party.  This would satisfy the requirement of an opposition to the dominant, ruling True Whig Party, even if the other party had its _base_ in the same settler group who ruled Liberia since its founding.   The Rice Riot soon followed.  It almost drove Tolbert out of office literally. This brings us to a phase of Matthews' political history that most Liberians are aware of - a promise to bring rice back to Liberia at under $ 10 a 100-pound bag after the price for the staple food had gone into orbit around the world at about $ 22 a 100-pound bag.  President Tolbert was doomed all because he would not let Matthews use the money he found in the safe at our UN Mission in New York. This is the year 2001.  Matthews is now said to be a very rich man - rich enough to own property in the Ivory Coast.  But it took a civil war that killed 220,000 native Liberians for Matthews to strike it rich.  I don't know exactly how we should go about doing it, but the people who became rich during the civil war or because of the civil war must be the first to be investigated after the war.   The war brought to Liberia illegal arms traders, diamond smugglers, drug transshipers, child molesters and other sexual predators.  What was Matthews gig?  He was and is a lazy man but an otherwise clever schemer whose victims are hard to identify.  But because he has lived almost all his adult life at government expense, we who work outside the government to support ourselves and family members at home are his victims. From the time I was educated enough to understand what I was looking at, there has never been a sustained effort to solve a national problem because Liberia has a history of supporting a class of lazy consumers of public money and services demanded from the underclass.  Matthews' father sucked the underclass in his generation.  The son is feeding on our generation. Although most problems require money to solve, whenever a lump sum of money dropped into the laps of our political leaders, they first bought things like a Presidential Yacht, built huge edifices like an Executive Mansion right after taking out scholarships for their kids to study abroad.  The kids acquire a taste for conspicuous consumption and return home to feed on the efforts of the next generation of working class Liberians.  This is the class that many ambitious Liberian politicians from different ethnic backgrounds try to emulate.  Matthews was born into that class.  Therefore Liberia's net output for the century and a half of its existence has been one generation of ruling thieves after another. We have done precious little else besides catering to these people.  We are therefore faced with the same infrastructural inadequacies that some infant nations conquered decades ago when Liberia was already a century old.   When we did not have a certified thief for a President, we had a deviant of sorts.  President William Tolbert Jr. was one.  I understand the gravity of what I am about to say, but I will debate any Tolbert (or anyone else) any day regarding the dirty man named William Tolbert who was a President of Liberia and President of the Baptist World Alliance. Tolbert had both a formal education and a faith.  So what was his excuse for his dirty acts?  Virgins were his delight.  So what was supposed to happen to a 13-year-old after Reverend President William Tolbert pleased himself with her? Was she marked used, initiated and therefore available for those with much less exacting sexual preferences?  Well, maybe there should be some consolation in the fact that these were mostly tribal kids who were fed to President Tolbert on his presidential visits in the hinterland. But there were more sustained encounters with otherwise innocent girls in the cities than the hit-and-ride joy of sex President Tolbert had in the interior. And although he preferred virgins, Tolbert sampled enough inner-city girls to settle on some personal favorites who earned a second, third, and more rounds. These are the ones who bore the stray presidential children of Tolbert and other presidents.  Sadly, many of these children believed somehow that they were more important than others, even if they did nothing else but claim to be a President's child.  Still, these children have a problem they didn't create, so they deserve our sympathy and attention.   Matthews' biggest victim was the very man who gave him an opportunity to be known nationally - President William Tolbert Jr.  But if Matthews had any regrets about Tolbert's brutal death, it was hard to tell.  And that's because Matthews took the Presidential aircraft - Liberia's equivalent of the U.S. Airforce One - to Nigeria just days after Tolbert and 13 officials of his administration were dumped in a mass grave on the soft shore of a dirty stream passing through Monrovia.  Matthews took the plane and crew to Nigeria to attend an OAU ministerial conference.   As an epilogue to the sad end of President William Tolbert Jr., history will note that in 1980 the Nigerian nation refused landing rights to an aircraft bearing Liberia's newest Foreign Minister, Mr. Gabriel Baccus Matthews, following the coup that killed our President just days before.   Twenty-one years later, Matthews is preparing another Liberian family - the Teahjay family - for mourning.  But this may very well be the requiem of a schemer.  - Tarty Teh Copyrighted © Tarty Teh 2001 Washington, D.C., April 26, 2001 For related commentaries, visit: http://members.aol.com/Liberia99