Claim: The Executive Mansion’s official website has no information on former Presidents Weah and Sirleaf.
Verdict: Partly True, the website has a page for past presidents but numerous details are missing.
Full Text: Journalist Julius Jeh, a Liberian journalist who works for OK FM, claimed that there is no data or material about former president George Weah on the executive mansion website.
Jeh pointed out that, in terms of background information and research, this action would not be good even for the government itself.
The Post: “I have noticed that the Executive Mansion-Liberia official website has been cleansed of everything concerning former Presidents Weah and Sirleaf.
No document, speech, personal information, press release, video, or anything whatsoever from those times! I realized this last night while researching and trying to find a particular release from the Sirleaf era, but to no avail.
This is concerning to me as a researcher because all of this rich information would be pulled off the Internet. There are certain pieces of information that can only be found on this website. You will browse the Internet forever and not find it anywhere else.
I cannot say what the rationale is, but I believe this won’t augur well even for the very administration in terms of research and historical backgrounding. This is an erasure of history and information in an age of easy storage and access to information.
I think they should have links/tabs on the website that host all information from the Weah era and Sirleaf era or do whatever they can so we have somewhere online with all of said information.
I believe they should still have the data stored in their system. Kindly do the needful by uploading them online.“
The post had 111 reactions at the time of the search, 10 shares, and 190 comments. Jeh has turned off comments for the post.
Verification: Because of journalist Jeh’s social media account, we chose to double-check the information he presented.
First, we verified the journalist’s information by visiting the Executive Mansion website, finding that all of the data there is as current as January 2024. We also looked at the URL that journalist Jeh attached to his post on “Wayback Machine,” an Internet archive, it has details from 2007–2024.
At the same time, we went deeper to see whether we could find data on the website of former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the country’s first female president but we found nothing. Our search landed us on this link. It also confirmed that some of the data and information on President Weah and President Sirleaf have been frozen on the website. This is what is being displayed when you click the link
“This is historical material “frozen in time.” The website is no longer updated and some links may not work.”
Website for ex-President Sirleaf
It is also important to note that this is an old-age issue passed on from one government to another.
Conclusion: We believe that the information posted by the journalist is partially correct; our research revealed that some data about former presidents has been frozen on the Executive Mansion website.
