Same Actors, New Script? The Opposition’s Last Chance to Prove It Has Learned

THE SIGNATURES on Sunday’s joint communiqué were barely dry before the question every Liberian was already asking landed on the table: haven’t we seen this before?

WE HAVE. In 2005, a crowded opposition split the vote and handed the runoff to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. In 2011, the main challenger walked away from the runoff altogether. The Collaborating Political Parties won a Senate seat in 2020, then collapsed in a quarrel over a framework document and a flag-bearer long before the 2023 elections. By the time voters went to the polls, the men and women who had promised to stand together were campaigning against one another. The Unity Party, which had itself been part of that collapse, walked into the Executive Mansion by barely 20,000 votes.

SO, WHEN George Weah, Alexander Cummings, Dee-Maxwell Saah Kemayah, Simeon Freeman and Jonathan Mason put their names to eight pages accusing the Boakai-Koung government of selective justice, lost territory and a creeping police state, the grievances were not the news. Liberians know what the opposition is against. The news is whether it has finally learned how to stay together.

TO BE FAIR, the document suggests some lessons have been absorbed. The parties have not merged. They have not crowned a leader. They have not touched the 2029 ticket. They have created a joint technical committee, two members from each party, and given it the dull but necessary job of turning complaints into policy. They say, in their own words, that they will not try to manufacture unity by declaration. That sentence reads like a confession about the CPP, and it is the most honest line in the communiqué.

THE HOSTING arrangement also matters. The first roundtable was at Weah’s Jamaica Resort. The second was at Freeman’s Sinkor Palace. That may sound like protocol, but it answers a charge Musa Bility made loudly before the first meeting: that this was a CDC project with its leadership decided in advance.

AND YET Bility is gone. His Citizens Movement for Change walked out three days before the signing, saying the draft did not commit to real national reform. The opposition can call that a small loss. It should instead treat it as a warning. The CPP did not die in one dramatic night; it died one grievance at a time, each one dismissed as minor until there was nothing left.

HAVE THEY LEARNED from their mistakes? Partly. They have learned what not to say. They have not yet shown they know what to do. If this effort is to be different, we believe it must do at least five things.

FIRST, publish the rule before the name. The CPP did not collapse because it had too many candidates; it collapsed because it never settled, in public and in advance, how one of them would be chosen. A primary, a polling formula, a negotiated power-sharing deal: any of these is better than silence. The name can come in 2028. The rule should come in 2026.

SECOND, own the past. A coalition anchored by the CDC cannot lecture the government about selective justice while pretending 2018 to 2024 did not happen. Liberians remember the missing billions controversy and the officials sanctioned abroad. An opposition that wants to be trusted on corruption should say plainly which of its own it would hold to account.

THIRD, bring the doubters back in. The CMC’s objection was not about seating arrangements. It was about reform: the structure of government, the institutions, the laws. That argument deserves an answer, not a shrug. So do the absences of the Liberty Party and a divided NPP. A tent that is wide only on paper will not hold.

FOURTH, produce something. The technical committee should publish positions, with deadlines, on the issues the communiqué raises: resettlement for families evicted from their homes, pay for teachers and health workers, the border in Foya, an independent drug inquiry. Liberians have heard enough roundtable statements. They have rarely been handed an opposition plan they could hold in their hands and judge.

FIFTH, leave Monrovia. Elections in Liberia are not decided at resort roundtables or palace signings. They are won in Lofa, Nimba, Grand Gedeh and Bong. The communiqué promises outreach in all fifteen counties. That promise should be the first one kept.

NONE OF THIS lets the government off the hook. The questions the opposition has raised about the Foya project, the SIB transfer and the handling of the drug busts are serious, and the Boakai administration would be wise to answer them with documents rather than with dismissals. An opposition with a good argument is a problem. An opposition with a good argument and a working structure is a threat.

THE PEOPLE who signed Sunday’s communiqué have been here before, some of them more than once. They know the script. The only question left is whether they are prepared to write a different ending. Liberians will judge them not by what they signed, but by who is still standing beside whom when the ballots are printed.