The Booth On Every Corner: A state that visits only at election time has left the future of Liberia to its dealers.

Dedication: For the victims of narcotics, who took the path knowingly or not and lost control of it once it took hold.

Every community in Liberia now keeps a booth, the counter of a dealer who sells the country’s future by the sachet: kush in the streets, tramadol on front porches and in kitchens, cocaine, heroin and marijuana for those who can pay more, and a trade that has reached the schools. Its epicenters are the slums of Monrovia, the places the republic forgot first and remembers last, yet it runs from Sanniquellie to Buchanan and from Harper to Tubmanburg.

The Global Action for Sustainable Development counted more than 866 ghettos in Monrovia alone in April 2023, with some 100,000 chronic users living in and around them; the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency puts the figure for Montserrado County near 1,500; and the United Nations Population Fund estimates that one in five young Liberians now uses narcotics. Those figures only confirm what the street announces without them: the smoke at dusk and the petty theft that follows it, the mother watching the son she depended on go under by inches.

History supplied the first customers. When the war ended, a disarmament programme collected rifles from young men who, by several accounts, had often been given narcotics to make them brave at the front, and it never treated the addiction they carried home, an omission GASD’s analysis calls a choice that haunts the present generation. The booths opened where the programme stopped.

In 2023 Joseph Nyuma Boakai, campaigning against a government his supporters said had done too little about drugs, made the war on narcotics a priority and called his project a rescue mission, a phrase I first heard from Barack Obama in Nairobi in July 2015, where it described Josephine Kulea, who had helped free more than a thousand girls from abuse and forced marriage by planning the rescues herself. In her hands rescue was a verb: someone walked into danger, and someone else walked out of it. In Liberia it has become a noun, a slogan that outlives every rally, while experts quoted in the Liberian press describe the drug war as lacking urgency.

The economy, we are told, is growing; yet the growth has found neither the schools nor the clinics, neither the farms nor the roads, and it has not found the Mesurado River, which open defecation, documented by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, continues to foul. The 2024 Multidimensional Poverty Index from UNDP and Oxford, drawn from 2019/20 survey data, finds 52.3 percent of Liberians poor in several of health, education and living standards at once, and an economy that grows in the ledger and shrinks in the household is not recovering, whatever its ministries report.

I learned how this lands in 2023, on a campaign tour of Barkedu, in Quardu Gboni District. I was not a member of the Unity Party, but I had endorsed its ticket and believed in it, and when I came upon two women in Congress for Democratic Change T-shirts, smiling easily and arguing their party’s case without a flicker of fear, I took them for the kind of village activists every analyst overlooks and every campaign depends on. In a modest tone I asked why they stood with a party that had, in my view, failed its social contract, tinkering with political and financial instruments when the country needed structural reform. One of them took me on, an intellectual in her own right, and I admired her at once.

She told me, with disarming honesty, that CDC officials had given them small amounts of cash and that they expected more after the runoff, since the CDC had edged the Unity Party in the first round. I answered with the ARREST Agenda, its plans for agriculture, roads, sanitation, education and tourism, and they listened as though their integrity depended on my reply. Then she drank some water, cleared her throat, and gave me her antithesis. I was making sense, she said, but they had heard every word of it in every election cycle, from left and right, in good manifestos and bad, and after the vote nobody came back; right now it was about the money. I had no reply. I thanked them and moved on, and in the weeks afterward I found that I agreed with everything she had said.

Vote-buying deserves understanding before it deserves condemnation, because a woman who sells her vote is pricing the one thing the state has ever asked of her, at the only moment it asks. The fault lies with a vulture democracy that exists in form and never in substance, a Seasonal State that appears once per election cycle and sends a slogan in the interval, assembled by political hyenas to keep themselves in office. The absence that sells the vote also leaves the booth open: a state that does not appear in Barkedu on an ordinary afternoon does not appear in Clara Town either, and the dealers worked that out long before the ministers did.

Liberians answered such absences differently once, and the protests came before church and mosque. Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s the Progressive Alliance of Liberia and the Movement for Justice in Africa gathered farmers and market women, students of Cuttington and the University of Liberia, and area boys as sharp as any professor, around a single refusal to accept a table laid for the few, while the intellectuals of that age wrote their articles against the oligarchs and gave the government its headache. On April 14, 1979, a PAL march against a rice price increase became the Rice Riots, and on April 12, 1980 soldiers overran the Executive Mansion; historians still argue over the methods of PAL and MOJA, and over the opaque band of officers who collected the harvest, but nobody can pretend that a Liberian generation once sat politely through its own impoverishment.

Then the war ended, and the energy moved. Now the church and mosque come before the protests, the sound systems carry across whole neighborhoods, and the prayers ask God for what the state will not deliver, a petition no congregation can be blamed for filing. The silence that troubles me belongs to the intellectuals, academics and students who once gave governments headaches and now give them speeches, held in place by elite compromise.

The quietude has limits, and the evidence is recent. In August 2025 thousands of Liberians converged on the Capitol Building with a petition that asked for a national health emergency on drugs, a presidential anti-drug task force, mandatory rehabilitation for users and a twenty-year minimum sentence for major offenders. Janet Kollie, whose nineteen-year-old son lives in one of the ghettos, put the whole mood into a sentence: “Until we see big hands arrested, we won’t be silent.” Representative Prince Toles of Montserrado District 8 received the petition and promised decisive action, a promise the country should write down and hold him to. The protests came before church and mosque once, and August showed they can again.

A rescue would begin by giving the young something to do at seven in the morning and something to learn at fourteen about what kush costs, and it would treat users in clinics with trained staff rather than in cells, since a habit that began as a health failure is not cured by a jail. The security services would then be aimed above the street corner, at the suppliers who stock the sachet-sellers and, if the protesters are right, at the officials who shield them, a charge that party and campaign finance disclosure would dissolve or confirm in a single season.

Liberia has already run the experiment in killing its way out of rot. On April 22, 1980, ten days after the coup, thirteen officials of the Tolbert government were executed on a Monrovia beach, and what followed was a military regime, fourteen years of civil war, and a post-war political class that treats corruption as an industry. The country acceded in 2005 to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which commits it to abolition, and a repeal bill now has the backing of at least fifteen members of the House; a judiciary that cannot yet be trusted with a trafficker’s file cannot be trusted with his life.

Judge Learned Hand told Americans in 1944 that liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, and that when it dies there no constitution, law or court can save it. Liberia’s Constitution still stands. What needs rebuilding is the habit of showing up, at the Capitol and in the street, before the sermon and after it.

Joseph Nyuma Boakai did not ask Liberians for a mandate to manage the booths. He asked for one to close them, and nearly three years into that mandate every corner still has its dealer.

Author: Sallia S. Komala is a 2024 Economics graduate of Cuttington University, a son of Sarkonedu, Quardu Gboni District, Lofa County, Liberia. He can be reached at [email protected]