Monrovia — The United States Embassy in Monrovia has warned that the international community will “react negatively” to any delay in the 2011 elections caused by the failure of the country’s legislators to agree on reforms aligning constituencies more closely to the distribution of the population.
The warning follows a decision of Liberia’s House of Representatives in March to reverse its decision to pass a law raising from 20,000 to 40,000 the number of people needed in a district to form a legislative constituency.
The law, the Population Threshold Bill, sought to reapportion constituencies in keeping with the numbers and distribution of Liberia’s population revealed by a census carried out last year. The effect of the law and the census would have been to increase the number of representatives in the House from 64 to 86 but to reduce representation in less populated counties, especially in the south-east of the country.
In a letter to the Liberian Senate, the U.S. Embassy said it recognizes that a final determination of constituencies is a “sovereign” duty for the state of Liberia and reassures the Senate that the U.S. has no opinion on the eventual number of seats there should be in the legislature.
But, the embassy said, the legislature’s decisions should be based on the Constitution. The country now enjoys democracy and the rule of law and any decision to suspend part of the Constitution because of “political opinion” will be counter-productive, the U.S. added.
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The Constitution mandates the national legislature to prescribe a new threshold following the conduct of a census to allow for the reapportioning of constituencies across the country. The Liberian Institute for Statistics and Geo Information Services last year conducted the country's first census in 24 years.
The embassy letter provoked angry reactions from lawmakers.
The newly-elected president pro tempore of the Senate, Cletus Waterson – to whom the letter was addressed – said that these kinds of “threats” are not helpful. The letter should have been addressed to the foreign ministry, not the Senate, he added. “We are responsible people so people should not treat us as irresponsible.”
Waterson added that the bill was currently with the House of Representatives and the Senate would deal with it once it reached the body.
One of Waterson’s predecessors, Isaac Nyenabo, told reporters last week that the Senate could not act on a preliminary census report. It would be “legally wrong for laws to be based on preliminary census results,” he said.
The senator of Sinoe County, Joseph Nagbe, said the legislature was performing its duty and should not be dictated to. “Since the International community will react, let them react now so we will perish, after all the end of life is death.”
Many civil society groups and diplomats have been urging the legislature to pass the Population Threshold Bill swiftly so as not to derail the timetable for the 2011 elections. The bill was submitted to the legislature more than six months ago.
