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Social Justice to me, and as we try to understand it in Liberia, is the application of the laws
to all without distinction; ensuring that social services are provided to all of our
citizens in an equitable and transparent manner; promoting equal opportunity and equity among
all; ensuring that all citizens are able to exercise their fundamental rights: freedom
of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion. So those to us are what social
justice is all about.
Now, I believe growth can be achieved without social justice, economic growth, but economic
development cannot be achieved without social justice and this is why every nation must
ensure that economic growth transforms into economic development and in that case you
can only do so if it proceeds concomitantly with the application of social justice.
Yes, I do believe social justice can be achieved for all. It may take a while. The pace of
achieving that may differ from country to country depending upon the environment, the
laws, the practices, the history, the culture, but I think ultimately all countries must
seek to achieve that ultimate objective.
ILO can work with the concerned organs of our government in promoting work, decent work.
This is something that we have already adopted as part of our policy. And I think the coordination
and support of our policies, our programs, our projects to achieve this for people is
the role ILO can play.
Well, we see the generation of employment opportunities as a means of being able to
increase per capita income, being able to have people take part in the processes of
development. This in itself will help to ease the global crisis. As a matter of fact the
kind of stimuli that has taken place in many of the countries affected by the global crisis,
with a specific objective of generating jobs, have themselves produced some of those results,
because we can see the easing of the crisis on many of our countries. So, in Liberia we
feel that the same thing applies to us: that we need to push those jobs and that will help.
I am optimistic; we have to work hard at it. We have said that in the short term, we create
jobs, but they are temporary jobs. But we are looking at the longer term, when we’ve
improved the skills of our people and the opening of the private sector as the main
engine to be able to absorb all of those who want work. That’s our national plan for
social justice and we are working hard toward the achievement of that goal.