WEST AFRICA-POPULATION: Liberian Refugees Wait for Stability

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

ORU, Nigeria, May 2 1997 (IPS) - Going home is the last thing on the minds of some 5,000 Liberian refugees in this camp, 98 kms north of Lagos, even as the peace and electoral process get on track in their country.

“Most of us in the camp fear there may be (an) election and one of the warlords may lose and start the problem all over again,” says twenty-nine-year-old Anderson Cherub.

A woman refugee who gave her name simply as Regina shares Cherub’s fears: “I look forward to going back home, but not until we have had a successful election. We will vote in the camp if they ask us to vote”.

The refugees are reluctant to return home, because Liberia has had many false starts on the road to peace. On August 19, 1995, the Liberian warring factions signed a peace accord providing for the creation of a reconstituted Council of State, which was to remain in power for a period of one year, pending elections.

This new transitional Council was formally installed on September 1, 1995 and elections were slated for August 20, 1996. But by April 1996, the warring factions were at each other’s throats once again. Fighting rapidly intensified in the capital of Monrovia, leading to the displacement of thousands of civilians.

“For now I will not immediately go home because there was a moral lesson I was taught on April 6, 1996 when Charles Taylor and Alhaji Kromah took up arms again after a peace accord,” Cherub says.

The bloody clashes in Monrovia disrupted a voluntary repatriation programme that was being worked out, which many refugees in Oru camp were hoping would be their ticket home.

It took the intervention of the international community, including the monitoring troops from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOMOG) to relaunch the Abuja Peace Plan.

This resulted in the disarmament and demobilisation of more than 60,000 troops in November 1996, and the January 1997 kick off of the ongoing electoral process. Elections to usher in a civilian government were scheduled for this month, but there are indications that there might be delays.

These developments have done little to comfort onlookers such as Cherub, who believes that rather than disarming the fighters, ECOMOG only took the guns that were handed over to them.

“There are many weapons still buried and the warlords can easily take up arms again,” says Cherub. “My fear is that there might be more guns hidden than those that have been retrieved. Many of us will not want to go home until everything is settled. With me, the President has to be in office for at least one year before I can think of going to Liberia.”

Another refugee regards the outcome of the ballot as inconsequential, noting that: “The problem is not of Liberian making, it is American/Liberians who still want us to serve them. That is the cause of our problem. The problem is not based on who wins elections or not. It is beyond that.”

Liberia was founded by liberated black slaves from the United States. The descendants of the slaves, now constituting about 42,834 of Liberia’s one million people, formed the political hierarchy of the country, which became independent in 1847.

But it is not only the political instability which keeps Liberian refugees in Nigeria. For many, more important than the events in their country, is their own personal development.

Cherub is reluctant to leave without completing his degree in computer science with the University of Ilorin in the middle belt state of Kwara.

“Going back home is attached to individual interest. For me, for now, whether there is a President or not in Liberia, what I want in place in Liberia now is not there, and that is education,” says Barh Ricky Nyondy, an economics student at Ogun State University, Ijebu-Igbo, about 10 kms from the Oru camp.

“Liberia is my country, I am free to go, the constitution will soon be in place and things will be okay, but the University of Liberia can not accommodate me. It does not offer a Masters degree programme for my field of study which is my next target,” Nyondy said. “I cannot go back immediately. I want to have a Masters degree and Phd in Nigeria before I can go back”.

Nyondy believes that without a good education, he might suffer discrimination in employment in Liberia, as he is from the late Liberian President Samuel Doe’s Krahn ethnic group.

“To work in Liberia, they will look at my educational qualification and where I belong and since I am from Doe’s area which they believe brought about the war, I am likely to be looked down upon without a good education,” he told IPS, in an interview conducted on his half-acre cassava farm near the camp.

The land rented to him by landowners in Oru village for 200 Naira (about 2.3 U.S. dollars) per year fetches him an average of 10,000 Naira (125 U.S. dollars) a year.

Nyondy uses these earnings to pay his school fees at the university and to supplement the 12 cups’ rice-ration allotted to him, his wife, four children and a younger brother every month by the National Commission for Refugees. A cup is 250 grammes.

“Right now we are not on government or UN scholarship. We don’t have any place to get school fees which have gone up…to 17,000 Naira for new intakes. The 1995/96 intakes paid 8,150 Naira and (it was) 2,800 Naira for those of us that got in during the 1993/94 session,” he explained.

“The leader of the Liberian interim government, Ruth Perry and other leaders should give us scholarships, especially to those of us in Nigeria since we are the ones to take over from them in future,” Nyondy said.

“While they are spending on the new constitution and elections, they should spend on education through sponsorship for those interested in education, because we believe education is the best way to resolve our problem,” he added. “If Liberians were educated, the problems we have now in our country would not have arisen at all”.