Arresting a former Vice President took courage. Arresting the serving officers and officials still linked to the same network will take something harder: a willingness to point the law at people still inside the government’s own house.
LET US SAY PLAINLY what deserves to be said plainly: Wednesday’s arrest of Jewel Howard-Taylor was a serious act, and this newspaper credits the government for taking it. Stopping a former First Lady and Vice President at the airport, taking her to Liberia National Police headquarters, and charging her under the full weight of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the Penal Law and the Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Law is not a symbolic gesture.
IT IS THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL single action this administration has taken in a drug investigation that has, until now, moved mostly against people far below her rank. Whatever else is true about how this case unfolds, the government did something Wednesday that no one could accuse it of doing quietly.
BUT AN INVESTIGATION is not judged by its most dramatic arrest. It is judged by its pattern, and the pattern so far tells a story this newspaper cannot ignore. RIA official Mark Kuiah was dismissed months ago and has never been charged with anything. LDEA Officer-in-Charge Fitzgerald Biago recused himself over an unresolved allegation and has not, as far as the public knows, faced formal charges either.
FORMER NSA DEPUTY DIRECTOR Gerald Smith was “called in for questioning” this week, a phrase that has so far meant something considerably gentler than what happened to Taylor. And FrontPageAfrica has reported that two currently serving police officers are alleged to have escorted the drug shipment at the center of this entire case to the stash house in Paynesville — a role more directly tied to the physical narcotics than anything yet alleged against Taylor — and neither has been named publicly, let alone arrested.
THAT CONTRAST IS the danger sitting inside an otherwise credible investigation. If the government continues to reserve its most forceful, most public, most immediate action for a former official now outside power, while its own serving police officers and security personnel are met with recusals, quiet questioning and unnamed status, it will hand critics exactly the narrative they are already reaching for: that this is not a drug investigation applied evenly, but a selective one, aimed at a politically convenient target while shielding people who still carry the government’s own badge.
THAT PERCEPTION, once it hardens, does not stay contained to the officials it is aimed at. It attaches itself to every case the government brings afterward, including the one against Taylor herself, and gives her defense exactly the kind of asymmetry argument that can turn a strong prosecution into a contested one.
Minister Tweh said it himself, in his own words, standing at his own podium: no office too high, no political connection too powerful, no sacred cows, no selective justice. Those words were aimed, presumably, at people like Taylor.
THIS NEWSPAPER WOULD ask the Minister to aim them, with equal force and equal speed, at the two police officers his own investigators say escorted narcotics to a stash house, and at every NSA official whose proximity to this network goes beyond a single afternoon of questioning. If the evidence supporting Taylor’s arrest justified the manner of it — public, swift, and formally charged within days — then evidence of officers physically moving the drugs in question justifies nothing less.
WE DO NOT SAY this to diminish what happened Wednesday. We say it because what happened Wednesday only means what the government says it means if the same energy, the same speed and the same willingness to name names now turns inward, toward the people still on its own payroll. Liberians did not ask their government to prove it could arrest a former Vice President. They asked it to prove it could arrest anyone connected to this network, regardless of whether that person still works for the state. The first test is behind us. The harder one is still ahead.
