No condition is permanent. You may be up today but down tomorrow. Or, you may be down now wondering when it would be your turn and then one day, unexpectedly, your dim light begins to shine and you begin a joyous journey up.
Ups are sweet places; high-flying and eagle-like on strong wings, floating in the skies. But lows! Who wants the lows! But even though we don’t desire lows so zoom our prayers on the highs, there comes a time when the lows descend on us with reckless abandon. Some lows can be too low for words to describe. So when I came across the story of Jenkins Scott in the Liberian media, it got my full attention. He went from a very high-high to a very low-low.
The story of Major Jenkins Scott is such a powerful cautionary tale with layers upon layers of lessons for all. Folks who are on their lows can learn useful lessons from Jenkins Scott on how not to behave if they’re ever graced with the chance to rise above their current funky stations in life. People who are currently on their way up in society would learn to pause to smell the roses. Those who are currently on the highs in life would need to do a whole lot of pausing to reflect.
Who is Major Scott?”
He was powerful; a lawyer who became the Minister of Justice of Liberia after the People’s Redemption Council (PRC) of Samuel Doe successfully overthrew the True Whig Party in a bloody military coup d’état on 12th April, 1980. Stories about Jenkins Scott are legend and grim. Yes, he was hailed by some but many saw him as the devil incarnate – wicked, ruthless, callous and a champion of excesses of atrocities including alleged and unspeakable bloody murderous human rights abuses like mutilations.
He is also accused of being one of the central characters who planted the seeds that led to the bloody civil wars in Liberia. Jenkins Scott was Justice Minister when opposition figure, now President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was thrown into prison. Several journalists were also imprisoned without trial as ‘enemies of the state’ during the lawless and brutish Doe regime.
Scott was feared, as such people are feared. It is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A man I spoke to described Major Scott as follows; ‘Just the mention of his name brought fear.’ So the Minister of Justice had a reputation for abusing justice.
Ghanaians alive and politically conscious in the 1980’s can relate to this story of fear of leaders. At the mention of some names, at the sight of a soldier with a gun, knees wobbled and hearts palpitated; even manhood feminized. Ghanaians suffered their own atrocities in the 1980s. The West African region was heated up by adventurist soldiers who toyed away with the lives and fate of their citizenry. That was the era of Major Scott in Liberia.
But on Saturday, November 6, a reporter of one of Liberia’s leading newspapers, the New Democrat, discovered Major Scott asleep in a pile of garbage in the neighbourhood of the Temple of Justice, the magnificent building in Monrovia that houses the Supreme Court. He was hungry, thirsty and dirty. The irony is that one of the most powerful ministers of justice ended up in a pile of ‘bola’ at the justice ministry – his former empire. What a cruel joke life can play on the unsuspecting!
Photographs of Scott I’ve seen dated as recently as 2008 depict him as doing well. One of them even carries a caption quoting him as saying, ‘I want to be Liberia’s Ambassador to The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.’ The details of what happened in the two-year period from ‘I want to be Ambassador’ to I’m laying in a pile of garbage, hungry, thirsty and dirty is at best, murky and eye-popping. Probably, something mental was already simmering inside of him all along from the effects of war.
Beyond morality, beyond thoughts of ‘it serves him right’, there are lessons for a county like Ghana that has not been to war. The hard frightening fact is that a war might be waged for a short period but the spill-over of war could take generations to cure and clean up. Seven years after the two senseless civil wars, one can visibly see the scars of war in Liberia on buildings with glaring bullet holes. Some of these buildings seem to stare at you and whisper, “We were victims too! We have bullet holes to show for the merciless pounding.”
The bullet holes in some buildings have been patched. Yet, when you look closely beneath the patchwork of cement, you can still see the scars left behind. If walls made of concrete still bear witness to war, what about the scars left behind in people’s hearts and minds?
Enters the results of research:
The results of two separate studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) conducted in Liberia by Harvard University in 2008 and 2010 will make your blood freeze about the long-term effects of war. Here are two key conclusions. (1) People exposed to extreme violence suffer mental disorders later in life. (2) Liberians who were exposed to sexual violence (rape) during the war suffer more mental health disorders after the war than those who were not.
Here are some mind-numbing statistics. In the 2008 study of an adult household-based population, 40 percent of respondents were found to have symptoms of major depressive disorder, 44 percent with symptoms of PTSD, and eight percent were found to suffer from social dysfunction. Of those studied, 33 percent had served time with fighting forces. The results of the studies suggest that sexual violence impacted on both males and females during the Liberian civil wars.
One of the studies found that villages that had experienced greater suffering from the war had a higher prevalence of PTSD than villages that did not suffer much during the war. The researchers found that surprisingly, individuals who were not even combatants of the war because they were very young at the time, also showed high prevalence of PTSD.
The physical wars have ended but the psychological war endures – in the mind. War is traumatic both physically and mentally – what is known as psycho-social trauma. The 14 year civil wars spanned the period between 1989 and 1997 and 2003 to 2004. Jenkins Scott was at the centre of the violent regime. Who knows what he did? Who knows what he witnessed? Who knows what he ‘directed’ to be done and watched as they were being done? A lot must be stuck in his mushy tissue – the brain.
So key questions being asked in Liberia include: “Is Jenkins Scott crazy?” Why did he end up in a garbage pile at his former empire office?
So what for Ghana?
Speak peace to Ghana. If during the 2012 ‘Crude Oil” Elections, naughty blood-thirsty loud-mouthed low-cost individuals run their stinky mouths on radio stations beating war drums, bragging that if their political party does not win, they will burn Ghana and let the blood flow, yell into their ear drums, “Tofiakwa, NO WAR FOR GHANA!”
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