The State introduced Siren and was meant to clear the road for the state’s most urgent business.
But, in today’s Monrovia, Liberia’s Capital, sirens are used to clear the road for anybody or every ‘Jack, Dick, or Harry’ with a title, a connection, or the sheer nerve to fit one.
There was a time in Liberia when the wail of a siren meant something urgent. It meant the Head of State was moving, or his deputy, or that an ambulance was racing a sick or wounded person to a hospital for emergency treatment.
During those days, siren sound was rare, and because it was rare, it commanded respect.
A Liberian who heard it pulled aside not out of fear but out of a shared understanding that the business behind that sound outranked his/her own.
Such knowledge and understanding as it relates to the essence of sire use has unfortunately gone to oblivion in nowadays Liberia.
Today, the use of siren has become the common property of every big man/woman who wishes to be mistaken for one.
Ministers, deputy ministers, lawmakers, judges, agency heads, their aides, their escorts, and a swelling crowd of private citizens with money, political and other so-called connections have all fitted their vehicles with the scream of authority.
What was once the mark of the highest office of our land has been seized— abrogated, taken without right— by anyone bold enough to bolt a device onto a jeep.
Sirens have a place in every society. No serious person disputes that a president, an ambulance, a fire truck, or a genuine security emergency deserves an open road.
But, every society, Liberia being of no exception, that permits the use of siren also governs it by law, precisely because the sound is a form of power, and unchecked power is always abused.
Liberia has such a law. The Vehicle and Traffic Law—Title 38, Chapter 6, Section 6.21-- reserves sirens for defined categories of use. It does not hand the privilege to any man or woman simply because he/she carries a title.
The government itself said as much this year. In February, the Ministry of Justice declared plainly that siren privileges are not attached to public office, rank, status, or position, and warned ministers, legislators, judges, agency heads, political appointees, private security escorts, and ordinary citizens that they had no authority to install or sound them.
For a brief moment, it appeared the state had found its nerve. However, the nerve did not last a week. Within days, the same Ministry, standing with the Police before the House of Representatives, retreated —clarifying that lawmakers were authorized after all, and reciting an exemption list so long it now reads like a roll call of the entire government: the convoys of the President, his spouse, the Vice President, former Presidents and Vice Presidents, a half-dozen ministers, the Chief of Staff and his deputy, the Speaker, the President Pro-Tempore, every member of the Legislature, the Chief Justice, every Associate Justice, and whatever security agencies the President cares to add.
A privilege that once belonged to two offices now belongs to hundreds. Small wonder the ordinary driver on Tubman Boulevard cannot tell the lawful siren from the stolen one.
And so Monrovia has surrendered to unbridled noise. From Sinkor to Paynesville, from the bridges to Capitol Hill, the air is torn all day by sirens, announcing men/women who are late, or important, or merely impatient.
The sound spreads through the city like a contagion—and Liberians know contagion. We learned during Ebola, and again during COVID, to dread certain sounds, to tie them to sickness and death and the loss of ordinary life.
Now a new kind of epidemic moves through our streets, spread not by a virus but by some public officials, as though the harassment of a defenceless population had become almost a deliberate and approved policy of the state.
Critics of the government are alleging that some of the sirens are aiding drug traffickers and other clandestine activities aimed at diverting public attention.
The Environmental Protection Agency has at last begun to name noise pollution as the public-health threat it is, promising a nationwide crackdown on the din of generators, bars, and speakers.
Good. But no crackdown will mean anything if the loudest offenders are some of the very officials sworn to enforce the law. A government that cannot silence its own convoys has no standing to silence a street preacher.
The remedy is not complicated. Publish the lawful list, and then shrink it. Strip the sirens from every vehicle not on the legitimate list.
Let the Police stop the offenders without fear of the titles seated inside. Until then, the message the siren sends to the Liberian people is not “make way for the nation’s business.” It is “make way for us, because we can, and you cannot stop us.”
Towards Economic Empowerment And Reconciliation
