By Togba-Nah Tipote Founding Leader
Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA)
July 1, 2021 is the 100th Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
This Commentary begins by congratulating the government and people of the PRC on this Anniversary, through the PRC Ambassador to Liberia, H. E. Zhang Yue, in the language of the PRC: Qingzhu Zhonguo Gongchengdeng Chegli 100 Zhounian.
Why should this Congratulatory Message be sent? Every message from Liberia should be sent on the basis of the main long-standing and widespresd problem of poverty in Liberia.
The PRC ended extreme poverty in the PRC in 2020.
In thirty years, the poverty rate in the PRC has decreased from 80 per cent to 0.6 per cent! In Liberia, more than 80 per cent of the population remains poor with access to at most less than USD2 a day while the Legislators have access to at least USD1,000 a day and their foreign friends/partners, in the commercial sector alone, have access to at least USD2 million a day!
Starting from the 1950s, the phenomenon of economic growth without economic development began to show concretely its ugly face in Liberia, where less than one per cent of the population accounted for more than sixty per cent of the income and wealth (Robert Clower, et al, 1966).
Evidence like this in Liberia and elsewhere globally led the New York Times Award Winning Professor Thomas Piketty of France to write about the Increasing inequality within countries and among countries in his book Capital and Ideology (Piketty, 2020).
I had the opportunity to learn about the transformation from poverty generation to poverty alleviation in the PRC on a first hand basis when I went to the PRC nearly a decade ago to attend the Africa-PRC Conference on Sharing Development Experiences, where I served as Chairperson of the Africa Participants. As I do some singing, the PRC arranged for me to sing the Beijing Olymics theme song, Wo Hor Nee (We are one), with one of the PRC’s best singers on radio and telivision.
I sang the same song in Liberia at the Opening of the new PRC Embassy
Given the Trump four year rule of unilateralism in the United States of America (USA), the Xi Jinping multilateralism of the PRC has prevailed to the point that the PRC is providing Global Leadership as seen in the Global Anti-nuclear Agreement and The Global Change Agreement while climbing to be the second largest economy in the world.