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Crowds boo Liberia's Bryant
11/12/2004 20:20 - (SA)
Monrovia - Liberia's Interim President Gyude Bryant was met with jeers and boos Saturday as his siren-blazing motorcade turned into one of Monrovia's main streets.
An AFP correspondent on the scene witnessed as hundreds of people yelled "thief! thief! thief!"
Crowds sought to approach the limousine in which Bryant was traveling, but the motorcade picked up speed and left the area.
"He's a thief," said Martha Myers, one of the women among the angry crowd. "He hasn't kept a single one of the promises he made."
Another protester, James Konnah, said Bryant and his followers "are stealing the resources of the country. You heard what the American Treasury said. This government is a gang of thieves."
He was referring to blunt statements made Thursday by a a deputy assistant Treasury secretary, David Loevinger, who lambasted Liberia's transitional government for bad economic management that he said "cost the Liberian people dearly."
He said a large part of government income went unaccounted for in the state coffers.
Bryant has been in power since the departure of former warlord turned president Charles Taylor into exile in October last year, following 14 years of virtually uninterrupted civil war in which about 300 000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of others forced into exile.
- AFP
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