By Alex Yomah
The continuous reports of in-house squabbling within the ruling Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) has now uncover plans to rescind a provision in its Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which binds the political marriage.
The report says, there are plans to abrogate the MoU which among other things states that wherever the coalition has an incumbent lawmaker, only that incumbent lawmaker’s party has the sole right to place candidate in that electoral district or County.
However, contenders of Bomi and Maryland Counties’ Senatorial seats are at the verge of reaching the National Election Commission for interpretation; this paper told sources closed to the Coalition.
Meanwhile, the political leader of the Liberia People’s Democratic Party (LPDP), Alex Tyler has indicated that the Governance Council (GC) of the Coalition has laid to rest the clause which allowed only incumbent senator’s party the legal right to do in-house vetting to maintain such slot.
Tyler stated that the clause as mentioned in the MoU was intended only for the 2017 elections and noted that the Coalition can now conduct primaries in every district/county amongst the three political parties’ candidates if there are any in order to select the Coalition’s candidate through a competitive and credible process.
Responding to Mr. Tyler’s assertion on account of anonymity, one of the candidates described the former speaker assertion as ‘incorrect.’
The stalwart of the party who trashed Tylers statement added; “That assertion was a product of falsehood. If a senior member of the Coalition can make such loud statement on a live radio show without any constitutional backing to substantiate it, then we have to seek NEC or the courts for interpretation”
“To clarify this, since the Coalition was consummated, there has been no amendment to the documentation that effectuated the deal. Here is what happened, in February of this year, the Governance Council for the first time held an official meeting and key on the agenda at that meeting was the senatorial elections. There were two sticky issues from Maryland and Bomi Counties.
“In Maryland, we have one NPP Slot, incumbent Dan Morais is re-contesting and NPP Chairperson, James Barney is also contesting and the NPP is divided on that while in Bomi County, NPP incumbent Sando Johnson already announced his decision to retain the seat and interestingly, Alex Tyler who has engendered a huge supports from other members of the Coalition is doing all to contest the same seat when the NPP has an incumbent,” the source clarified.
According to our sources, in the February GC meeting, each party was represented by seven officials excluding the Coalition’s standard bearer, George Weah, Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor, the Speaker and Pro-tempore and explained how President Weah was annoyed over the unabated in-house battle and disregard to the MOU and that he even got up in that meeting and expressed out of anger that, everybody must go for primary and whoever wins, the Coalition will support that candidate.”
The sources are apparently it is the statement made by the standard bearer out of anger that Mr. Tyler has based his assertions but this does not in any way mean that automatically the law is amended. “There hasn’t been any amendment made to the law,’ the sources pointed out.
The NPP had been strongly opposed to that assertion made by the standard bearer since that meeting and has maintained that Bomi county is occupied by a NPP senator and such, there will be no primary conducted there by the Coalition.
“We have precedence in the Coalition; in Bong County, the NPP slot was given to Representative J. Marvin Cole who was filling the vacancy created by Vice President Taylor while in Montserrado County, the slot was given to Senator Saah Joseph who was also filling in the vacuum created by President Weah and so then similar precedence must continue. Any attempt to annul this law, we will go to NEC to interpret the law,” our sources maintained.