IPNews-Monrovia, Liberia-18 January 2018:The Press Union of Liberia has termed as bold-face scapegoating, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s latest slam on the journalism community in Liberia.
The Union believes the President’s statement attempts to justify her low points during her stewardship of the country.
Speaking Tuesday in Paynesville at the dedication of the partially rehabilitated complex of the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS), President Johnson-Sirleaf blamed journalists in the country for not exerting the needed effort in pushing her government for the passage of a law to decriminalize speech offenses.
President Johnson-Sirleaf said Liberian journalists failed her by not drafting a legislation to ensure the abolition of People Redemption Council degree 88 that criminalizes speech offenses in the country.
According to her, Liberian journalists failed to act in their own interest because they were content, suggesting that she will not sign the bill if it were ever submitted.
The president said contrary to such suggestion, she was every ready to sign the bill to remove such decree from the books.
But in a statement Wednesday, PUL said the President signing of the Table Mountain Declaration was as a result of the revolutionary role led by the Liberian journalism community and its partners in Africa.
On 21, July 2012, President Sirleaf became the second African head of state to endorse the Declaration of Table Mountain, which calls for the repeal of criminal defamation and ‘insult’ laws throughout Africa.
The PUL said almost six years on, President willfully ignored her commitment to the protection of free expression and only grand stood with a submission of a draft Act seeking to decriminalize defamation laws in Liberia on the eve of her departure from office.
The Union recalled that intolerance and hostility toward the media took a good part of President Sirleaf and her administration ill- treatment of media due to the unwavering coverage of nepotism and escalating wave of corruption in public service.
“President Sirleaf is leaving a Liberia behind where excessive libel damages are required in keeping deformation laws she had vowed to repeal,” the statement quotes the PUL as saying.
The PUL wants the President remain quiet on the media because her administration intentionally excluded the press in Liberia from its “reform policies” but hard-hitting treatment of the media on advertising were developed and employed which strangulated critical media institutions.
The Liberian journalists union has vowed to lobby with the incoming government to resubmit the bill seeking to repeal deformation Laws for subsequent action by the 54th Legislature.
