Following Your Dreams

FrontPageAfrica is my favorite Online magazine. It has landed on the ground in Liberia and now the people are going gaga about the print version now being produced there. The other news that some people tried to burn down the new facility of FrontPageAfrica, has me feeling a bit frustrated:

I am happy to hear that FrontPageAfrica now has a print version in Liberia. Imagine thirty pages of FrontPageAfrica news for the Liberian people. Wow! My happiness, though, is shattered by the news that some people decided to burn down the new facility at which this wonderful milestone is being carried out. Thank God the plan was miraculously foiled.

The elation being felt by your reading public is the same exhilirating feeling I felt in the 80s when the Daily Observer first hit the news stand. My wife and I almost went our separate ways whenever she forgot my paper at her office where my copy of the Observer was delivered. To end the bad blood, I instructed the carrier to deliver my copy of the Daily Observer to the Central Office mailroom in Harbel.

The office of the Daily Observer was shut down on many occasions during the period of military rule. Those shut downs really hurt those of us who depended on this publication for real news. To know that this new day in the country’s existence would produce people with the mentality of the 80s is indeed troubling. As I said when I first got introduced to the online version of FrontPageAfrica, your paper is my Liberian CNN. I hope the readers in Liberia will feel the same as they browse through those thirty pages of excellent news coverage.

There will always be obstacles as we all try to give a helping hand to the development of our country. Should we get discouraged, fold our hands, and do nothing? Should we be cowards, pack our bags and leave for another place that hardly knows us? The answer has to always be no. We must continue to follow our dreams and to do what is best for society, even with gasoline in plastic bags, tied to ropes.

Congratulations to FrontPageAfrica. Congratulations to the people of Liberia. In fact, as I am writing this piece, I am still going through the 92-page Sunday Edition of the Washington Post, a newspaper that had me looking funny when I was first introduced to it in 1990.

Let us all get on the FrontPageAfrica band wagon and help the government fight corruption.