President Boakai has given his own Minister of Justice 48 hours to report on his own drug chief. That deadline is the easy part. The harder part — the part that will tell Liberians whether “no sacred cows” was ever more than a good line in a good speech — is what he does with the answer once it lands on his desk.
WE GIVE PRESIDENT BOAKAI CREDIT for the 48-hour order. Asking the Minister of Justice for a detailed report on the allegations against LDEA Officer-in-Charge Fitzgerald Biago, on a fixed timeline, with his own name attached to the demand, is more than his government has done for most of the officials swept up in this scandal. It suggests, at minimum, that the president understood how badly this allegation — a truck, a second vehicle, a bar owner already facing prosecution — needed an answer that didn’t come from the accused agency itself. That instinct was right. What happens next will determine whether it meant anything.
HERE IS THE PLAIN truth this newspaper thinks the president already knows: a 48-hour report that Liberians never see or see only in a carefully worded summary designed to close the story rather than settle it, will do more damage to “no sacred cows” than if the deadline had never been set at all. Liberians have watched this pattern before. A dismissal here, a recusal there, a promise of a thorough investigation, and then silence — while the case quietly stops making headlines and the official in question either fades from view or, eventually, fades back in. Mark Kuiah has been out of a job for weeks without a single charge filed. Inspector General Coleman’s own claim that trafficking was “sanctioned at very, very senior level” has never been followed by a name, from him or from anyone above him. If the Biago report follows that same script — findings received, reviewed, and never fully disclosed — the president will have taught the country exactly the opposite lesson from the one he delivered at last week’s commissioning ceremony.
WE ARE NOT ASKING the president to prejudge his own drug chief, and we are not asking him to treat a 48-hour investigation as a trial. Biago is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else this scandal has touched, and if the allegations against him do not hold up, Liberians deserve to hear that plainly and specifically, not simply assume it from the agency’s continued silence. But due process and public transparency are not in conflict here. The president can honor both by committing, now, before the report is even finished, to release its substantive findings to the Liberian people — not a press statement engineered to sound decisive while saying nothing, but the actual basis for whatever decision he makes. If Biago is cleared, show us why. If he isn’t, say so, and let the same legal process now underway against Moses Jallah and George Harris apply to him without exception. Liberians are not asking their president to fabricate guilt. We are asking him to let the facts speak, out loud, regardless of whose name they land on.
THAT, IN THE END, IS WHAT “let the chips fall where they may” requires of a president, and it is a harder standard than it sounds. It means being willing to let a report embarrass his own appointee if that is what the evidence shows. It means resisting the very instinct to manage a story quietly rather than confront it publicly, especially when the person under scrutiny sits atop an agency the president himself elevated. And it means treating Senator Konneh’s warning — that this could become the president’s own “Containergate,” a scandal that defines a presidency rather than merely interrupting one — not as an attack to be weathered, but as an accurate description of the stakes. Rhetoric got Liberians’ attention at the commissioning ceremony. Only transparency, applied without exception to the government’s own people, will keep it.
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS is a short window. What the president does with what comes out of it will be remembered far longer than the deadline itself. Be straight with the Liberian people, Mr. President. Show us the report. Let the chips fall where they may — even if, especially if, they fall on someone wearing your own government’s badge.
