More than 400 Liberians are sleeping in schoolrooms outside Abidjan, three weeks after bulldozers took their homes. Ghana already brought 228 of its own citizens back from the same demolition. Liberia has yet to answer.
THERE’S A VERSION OF THIS STORY where the Liberian government moves quickly, decisively, and visibly for its own people. That’s not the version playing out in Abidjan right now.
THREE WEEKS AGO, IVORIAN AUTHORITIES demolished the Vridi Canal community on the outskirts of Abidjan, part of a broader urban clearance program. More than 400 Liberian nationals — many of them fishermen and their families who’ve lived and worked in Côte d’Ivoire for over 60 years — lost their homes in the process, along with their belongings, their businesses, their documents, and in some cases their savings. Women, children, elderly people, and people with special needs are now sheltering in school buildings, sleeping in crowded rooms, and community leaders say conditions are dire and getting worse. At least one woman has reportedly given birth in a school building because she had nowhere else to go.
THAT ALONE SHOULD BE ENOUGH to move a government to act. What makes Liberia’s silence harder to swallow is the example sitting right next door. Ghana, facing the exact same demolition, assisted roughly 327 of its citizens and repatriated 228 of them through a coordinated operation run by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ghana treated this for what it is — a humanitarian emergency involving its own people, one that called for its own government to step in directly. Liberia’s community leaders in Abidjan have already pointed to Ghana’s response as the model they want their government to follow. They shouldn’t have to ask twice.
THIS ISN’T A COMPLICATED problem to describe, even if it’s not a simple one to fix. Liberians in Abidjan need emergency shelter, food, medical care, and sanitation right now, while they’re stuck in temporary facilities never meant to house displaced families for weeks on end. Beyond that, they need a government willing to find out how many of its citizens were affected, talk directly with Ivorian authorities on their behalf, and arrange transportation home for anyone who wants to return and rebuild in Liberia. A petition laying all of this out has already reached the Liberian diplomatic mission in Abidjan. The mission — and the government behind it — has what it needs to act. What’s missing is the action itself.
LIBERIA HAS A LONG, complicated relationship with its diaspora communities scattered across West Africa by decades of war and economic hardship — communities that send remittances home, that keep deep ties to Liberia, and that mostly hear from their government only when it’s convenient. This is a moment when it isn’t convenient, and that’s exactly the test. A government’s obligations to its citizens don’t stop at its own borders, especially when those citizens are elderly fishermen who spent sixty years building lives abroad because there wasn’t much to build at home.
PRESIDENT BOAKAI’S ADMINISTRATION doesn’t need to invent a playbook here. It needs to open the one Ghana already used: assess, engage, assist, and repatriate those who want to come home. Every week that passes without a visible Liberian response is another week those 400 people spend wondering whether their government even sees them. Liberia shouldn’t need a foreign government’s example to remember what it owes its own people. But if that’s what it takes, the example is right there. It’s past time to follow it.
