MONROVIA — Gregory Coleman did not sound like a man bracing to lose his job. He sounded like a man explaining, patiently and at length, why the job was always going to cost him something — and why he had made his peace with that a long time before Liberians started calling for his head. In extended remarks this week, the Inspector General of Police laid out, more fully than he ever has before, how he sees the fight he is leading, what he owes the president who defended him, and what he is and is not willing to say to the man publicly asking him to step aside.
By Rodney D. Sieh | [email protected]
“It Transcends Beyond Our Border”
Coleman began where he usually begins: with gratitude, and with scale. “I want to thank the president for being extremely generous to our team for the fight against this narcotic operation, not just in Liberia, but in the sub-region,” he said. “Our mandate has been clear, not just arrest and seizure, but dismantling the roots of these operations, and it being transnational, it doesn’t just affect Liberia, it transcends beyond our border. The spillover risk factor, if not dealt with here in Liberia, could be great.” It is a framing that matters for how he wants Liberians — and the region’s other governments — to understand what his team is doing: not a domestic drug bust that happened to grow large, but a transnational network whose consequences were never going to stay inside Liberia’s borders, whether or not the country was prepared to confront it.
“A Collective Effort”
He was equally deliberate about whose credit this is. “I think working together as a team, the joint security investigative team, my name may have been mentioned, but it has been collective effort, and we are very, very proud of the work that each and every member of that team has done,” he said — a line that reads, in the context of a week spent almost entirely discussing his own individual fate, like a man trying to redirect attention away from himself and back onto the institution he leads.
To Martin: “Keep Up the Advocacy”
It was in this fuller, calmer register that Coleman finally addressed Hassan Fadiga directly. “I don’t have anything to say to Martin. Martin is a brother who has been a great advocate,” he said. “He has made some accusations, maybe he has something, let him come forward with it.” Then, notably, he did not stop there the way his earlier, terser response had. “So, to Martin, keep up the advocacy, keep up the good work you have been doing well. If there’s anything credible, please bring it forward.”
It is, point for point, the same substantive position Coleman took in his first response to the recusal calls — he is not compromised, and he will step aside on his own if he ever believes he is. What is different here is the tone. Where his first answer read as defensive, this fuller version reads as something closer to magnanimous: an invitation to Fadiga to keep pushing, dressed in the language of brotherhood rather than dismissal. Whether that changes how Fadiga’s specific, narrower argument — that the appearance of a conflict matters regardless of what Coleman privately believes about himself — lands with the public is a separate question. Coleman is not so much answering that argument here as declining, warmly, to be moved by it.
“I Didn’t Expect to Be Loved”
Coleman’s fullest answer to his critics, in the end, was not really about Fadiga, or about any single accusation. It was about the nature of the job itself, in a country as small and as tightly woven as Liberia. “My commitment to this fight remains firm,” he said. “Like I said earlier, when I took on this role, I didn’t expect to be loved. This is a very difficult task. Liberia is a very small place. We’re dealing with people who we know, I mean, at different levels, people we’ve admired, people we’ve seen over the years. So it is a challenging thing, but we are committed to what we sign up for. Our oath to office remains our guiding principle, our faith, and our love for this country, just to see it better.”
That admission — that the people his team investigates are, in many cases, people he has personally known and admired — is as close as Coleman has come to acknowledging just how personally corrosive this kind of work is in a country where everyone of consequence tends to know everyone else. It is also, implicitly, an answer to why an investigation this sensitive was always going to generate exactly the kind of institutional entanglement now fueling calls for his recusal: in a country this small, the line between investigator and investigated was never going to be perfectly clean, no matter who held the job.
“He Inherited Corruption as the System”
The most striking thing Coleman said all week was not about Fadiga, or the president, or even his own resolve. It was about the country he was hired to police. “One thing, when we took on this role, we did a deep dive as to how could we help,” he said. “And the president didn’t just inherit a broken or corrupt system. He inherited corruption as the system. So in order to fight it, our contribution has been to deal with that which it is ferried upon, and it’s the culture of impunity, where people believe that they can use their power, political connection, and social status, and just get away with things.”
He described the strategy in almost architectural terms — start small, and let the foundation work upward. “That’s why we started with the lowest things, traffic infraction, restoring orders on the road. It started with complaints from the travel unions, because they started to get more tickets, going up to people answering for all of the crimes that are committed. This is a new day in Liberia. The culture of impunity has been fought.” It is a theory of institutional change that runs directly through this newspaper’s own reporting on this scandal: that a country which cannot enforce a traffic stop consistently was never going to enforce accountability at the top consistently either, and that closing that gap has to start somewhere unglamorous before it can reach somewhere powerful.
The President Backs Him, By Name
Coleman’s own account of his mission did not arrive in a vacuum. Days earlier, President Boakai had already settled, publicly, where he stood — addressing Coleman not through a spokesperson, but by first name. “Greg, my government remains fully supportive of your actions and leadership as you continue to spearhead the fight against illicit drugs in Liberia,” the president wrote. “You have the full backing of my government. We stand firmly behind your actions in the ongoing fight to rid Liberia of illicit drugs and protect our people.” Coleman thanked him publicly on Facebook within hours: “Thank you, Mr. President, for your continued confidence, support, and recognition of the work of the Joint Security. We remain committed to serving Liberia with professionalism, and integrity.”
Executive Protective Service Director Sam Gaye followed with a defense of his own, less measured than either man’s exchange. “When you live in a culture of impunity, the investigation and arrest of a high-profile person are unimaginable,” Gaye wrote.
“Unfortunately, and sadly, law enforcement officials become public enemy number one.” He credited Coleman with spearheading the Capitol Hill arson investigation, which produced charges against high-profile lawmakers in a case still pending, and with leading the transnational narcotics case that has now produced charges against a former Vice President — “the first time in our nation’s history,” as Gaye put it, that government actors at that level have faced this kind of prosecution. “The IG has become public enemy number one for doing his job,” Gaye wrote, closing with a line pitched at history itself: “History will judge all of us. Mr. IG, Godspeed!”
What None of It Answers
Here is the tension none of these statements — not Coleman’s own extended remarks, not the president’s message, not Gaye’s defense — actually resolves. Coleman describes a culture of impunity being dismantled from the bottom up, traffic stop by traffic stop, until it reaches the top. But two specific, unresolved threads sit inside his own institution, unmoved by any of this week’s rhetoric. Months ago, Coleman told this newspaper that trafficking in Liberia was “sanctioned at very, very senior level.” He has never named who. And FrontPageAfrica has reported that two currently serving Liberia National Police officers — answering, ultimately, to Coleman himself — are alleged to have escorted the drug shipment at the center of the Howard-Taylor case to the stash house in Paynesville. Neither has been named. Neither has faced anything resembling the swift, public reckoning applied to Howard-Taylor. If the culture of impunity really is being fought “going up to people answering for all of the crimes that are committed,” as Coleman put it, Liberians are owed an honest account of how far up inside his own force that climb has actually reached.
Fadiga’s Appeal, in Full
It is worth reading Fadiga’s original plea again, now that Coleman has answered it twice. “IG Coleman, my Bassa brother, this is not a personal attack,” the former LDEA deputy director wrote. “It is an appeal for transparency, accountability, and public confidence.” He said he sent the same message directly to President Boakai, and that the backlash since had been immediate. “They have been blowing up my phone with insults, anger, and frustration,” he told FrontPageAfrica.
Fadiga never accused Coleman of wrongdoing, then or since. His argument was always narrower than that: that perception itself, in an investigation this consequential, is a variable worth protecting deliberately rather than trusting to one man’s own confidence in his own ethics. “Sometimes,” Fadiga wrote, “true leadership means stepping aside to protect the greater good.” Coleman’s answer, however warmly delivered the second time around, is still fundamentally a request that Liberians trust his own judgment about his own conflicts — precisely the trust Fadiga’s appeal was built to question.
What Happens Next
For now, Coleman keeps his post, backed publicly by the president, defended publicly by the head of the Executive Protective Service, and speaking, at length and for the first time, in his own voice about why he believes the fight is worth what it is costing him personally. What remains unsettled is not his job security — that question, for the moment, appears closed. What remains unsettled is whether the culture of impunity he describes fighting, traffic stop by traffic stop, will ever climb high enough to reach the two unnamed officers inside his own force, or the unnamed name behind his own “senior level” claim. Coleman has told Liberians, in his own words, that he didn’t take this job expecting to be loved. He has not yet told them who, exactly, benefited from the system he says the president inherited — and until he does, that is the answer this newspaper, and Liberians who found his words this week persuasive, should keep asking for.
