Selective enforcement doesn’t need an order signed at the top to become real. It just needs to keep happening long enough for people to notice. Liberians have noticed. The government’s answer so far has been reassurance. What it owes the country now is proof.
HERE’S THE VERSION OF EVENTS THE GOVERNMENT would like Liberians to accept: every arrest is judged on its own facts. Flight risk, evidence, officer safety — that’s what decides who gets picked up and how. Any resemblance between who gets a battering ram at dawn and who gets a handshake at the airport is coincidence, not policy. It’s a defense that sounds reasonable enough on paper. The trouble is that it keeps having to be repeated, case after case, because the pattern keeps giving people fresh reason not to believe it.
PUT THE CASES NEXT TO EACH OTHER and the doubt more or less writes itself. Karwoudou Cole, the artist known as Bucky Raw, was on his knees on his own floor before sunrise, untying bags of cash while agents who’d already pushed past his family stood over him — the whole thing streamed live before he’d even been charged with anything. Paul King, named as the central figure in the biggest cocaine seizure Liberia has seen in years, got none of that. He flew home, walked through Roberts International, and turned himself in. The country then waited a full day — past a briefing that kept sliding hour to hour — before the Inspector General would even say so on camera. One man got dragged off his floor. The other got to walk in on his own terms.
THEN THERE’S MULBAH MORLU. His home was surrounded by police within a day of him organizing a protest about — of all things — the government’s handling of that same cocaine case. Police say he’s sitting on a stolen firearm. Morlu says he took it off a man sent to disrupt a peaceful march and planned to hand it over in open court, publicly, on his own schedule. Believe whichever version you want. What isn’t really in dispute is the speed of it: officers warned not to approach him alone, his house watched, the whole thing timed just ahead of his court date. Compare that to the actual suspects in a $19 million trafficking case, most of whom had already left the country before anyone came looking. They got a head start. Morlu got police outside his gate by morning.
NONE OF THIS, ON ITS OWN, proves an order came from the top — and it would be reckless to say it did without the evidence to show for it. But a government doesn’t get to hide behind “unproven” forever. When the same administration keeps producing this exact shape of gap — rough treatment for a musician, a protest organizer, a woman filmed naked in her own home during a raid, and something closer to courtesy for a man tied to a multimillion-dollar trafficking case — “coincidence” stops doing much work as an explanation. At some point it just starts sounding like a description of how the system runs, whether or not anybody meant it that way.
SO, PROVE OTHERWISE. The Unity Party says there are no sacred cows. Good — then show it where it actually costs something. Execute the warrants still sitting unserved against the suspects who ran before anyone knocked. Let Morlu have the court date he says he wants, out in the open, without a siege first. Say, specifically and publicly, how a drug raid ended with a woman filmed naked in her own home, and hold whoever let that happen accountable in a way the public can actually see. None of that needs a new law or a new commission. It just needs the government to extend to the people it finds inconvenient the same patience it has apparently had no trouble extending to people who, weeks later, still haven’t been arrested at all.
THIS ISN’T A SMALL THING TO GET WRONG. Countries don’t lose faith in their courts over one bad news cycle. They lose it in pieces — a dawn raid set against a quiet homecoming, a siege set against a head start — until people stop believing the law is blind and start assuming it just remembers some names better than others. Liberia is watching to see which government shows up next: the one that goes easy on power and hard on everyone else, or the one that actually means what it keeps saying about sacred cows. The warrants are still out there. The court date is still coming. Nobody needs another statement to settle this. They need an arrest.
