Several Liberians are beginning to publicly expressed foreseen difficulties ahead of this festive season.
Investigation revealed that the public perception is a result of the unregulated increment in the prices of almost all basic commodities in spite of the drastic reduction of the exchange rate.
Our reporter who visited several commercial centers throughout Monrovia and Paynesville Cities outlined how marketers and some citizens expressed frustration over the lack of a coherent explanation or program by the Weah-led government to address the deteriorating economic conditions.
Complaints from Liberians according to our reporter, include the inability to afford basic commodities and services, the high unemployment rate of citizens precisely the youthful population, and the lack of security.
Others alluded to the drastic decline in the US dollar exchange rate which is also a legal tender against the Liberian Dollar thereby resulting to scarcity on the Liberian market.
Although the Central Bank of Liberia (CBL) is expecting to receive a huge consignment of new family of banknotes by December but most citizens are more worried about the regulation of prices of basic commodities.
The Liberian leader through the CBL requested the Legislature to grant the permission to print a new set of family banknotes in the tune of LD48.734 billion as means replacing the mutilated money from the market to help stabilize the country’s economy.
But since the permission was granted by the Legislature, several economists are still questioning the rational of the printing and infusion of the new banknotes which they perceive will not yield any fruits due to the country’s poor fiscal policy, lack of technical capacity, and corruption in the public sector which is at its peak.
According to some of them, there has been no clear fiscal policy offered or explained by the government’s Economic Management Team (EMT) to ordinary citizens on projected economic growth and how they would translate to easing the hardship they are experiencing.
A local dealer in the Red light Market said, “We the business people are the ones feeling the burden because buyers are no longer buying our goods on grounds that they are very expensive or reason best known to themselves.”
“What is happening now is very frustrating especially so we have to sell before paying our children school fees and buying food for them. Now, we are already around the Christmas season and this thing is happening,” Mary Parker, a dry goods seller intoned.
“We cannot buy our goods when the US rate was high and now because it has dropped, you expect us to automatically bring our prices down; by that, we will be the loser and that is not fair to us as business people who sell before addressing our many problems,” she lamented.
Meanwhile, the marketers are at the same time calling on the government to see reason and hastily addressed the economic problems the country and its citizens are engulfed with, and thereby vowed to carry on an unspecified action if nothing is done to mitigate the situation. Bill W. Cooper writes.