“We Will Identify You! We will pursue you! We will find you!” President Boakai told the country Thursday. It was the strongest language he has used yet on this scandal. It was also, notably, delivered without a single name attached to it — which is exactly the problem this newspaper needs him to solve next.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG with President Boakai’s speech at Thursday’s commissioning ceremony. Read on its own terms, it was the most forceful public statement he has made on Liberia’s drug scandal, and some of it deserved every bit of the attention it received. “There will be no sacred cows in this Joseph Nyuma Boakai Administration,” he said, and he meant, specifically, that no one would be permitted to hide “behind poverty, public office, political influence, business interests, their family connections, or any other position of authority.” It is precisely the standard this newspaper has been asking his government to meet for two months. The trouble is not the standard. The trouble is the gap between that standard and what his own government has actually delivered so far.
CONSIDER WHAT THURSDAY’S speech did not do. It did not name the person or people Inspector General Coleman was referring to when he said this trafficking network had been “sanctioned at very, very senior level” — a claim that has now sat in public circulation for weeks without a single name attached to it, from Coleman or from the president. It did not mention Mark Kuiah, the former RIA deputy director named in a writ of arrest since June, tied by his own letter to the vessel Liberian troops spent days chasing off Rivercess, and dismissed from his post more than a week ago without a single formal charge filed against him. It did not address why, after a five-agency purge and a summer of headline arrests, the government has produced only a handful of actual courtroom prosecutions — Moses Jallah and George Harris chief among them, both charged, neither yet tried. A speech built entirely around the promise that no one is above the law would have been stronger, not weaker, for naming even one of these open questions and committing to an answer.
WE UNDERSTAND WHY a commissioning ceremony is not a courtroom, and why a president speaking in front of newly sworn judges has reasons — legal and political — to avoid getting ahead of active investigations. But Liberians have heard strong language on this scandal before, from Boakai and from the officials around him, and strong language has not, by itself, moved cases from dismissal letters to verdicts. This country’s last hundred-million-dollar cocaine case, in 2022, ended with the men accused in it walking free. That history is precisely why rhetoric this forceful needs to be followed, quickly and visibly, by something more concrete than the next speech.
WHAT WOULD MATCHING words with actions look like? It looks like Inspector General Coleman being asked, directly and publicly, to substantiate his own “senior level” claim or retract it — not indefinitely, not on his own timeline, but now, while the country is still paying attention.
IT LOOKS LIKE A CLEAR ANSWER on Mark Kuiah’s status: either charges, or a public explanation of why two months of investigation involving his name have not produced any. It looks like visible movement on the Jallah and Harris cases toward an actual trial date, so that “revolving door” remains the metaphor Boakai warned against rather than the description of what happened. And it looks like the president using the authority he clearly believes he has — the same authority behind Thursday’s “we will find you” — to press his own security and justice institutions for results on a timeline the public can see and measure, not just admire.
PRESIDENT BOAKAI TOLD the newly commissioned judges Thursday that their greatest legacy would not be measured by the number of cases they hear, but by the confidence their decisions inspire. The same test applies to him. Liberians did not doubt the sincerity of Thursday’s speech so much as they doubted, reasonably, based on two months of watching this scandal unfold, whether sincerity alone would be enough. The president has now set his own standard, publicly and in his own words. This newspaper intends to hold him to it — and the next test of “no sacred cows” will not be another speech. It will be whether a senior name is ever actually attached to the claim his own Inspector General has already made.
