A Vice President and a Senate Pro Tempore are both eyeing 2029, and both have reasons to want this port law to go their way. Neither reason has anything to do with fixing the security gaps still sitting inside it
WE DO NOT BEGRUDGE LIBERIAN POLITICIANS for looking ahead to 2029. Every democracy runs on ambition, and a Vice President and a Senate Pro Tempore each positioning for a future national ticket is not, on its own, a scandal. What should concern every Liberian is what sits underneath that positioning: a rivalry between Vice President Jeremiah Koung and Senate Pro Tempore Nyonblee Karnga-Lawrence that appears to be shaping how the port decentralization bill was written, whose interests it serves, and how quickly its unresolved security gaps get fixed, if they get fixed at all. Karnga-Lawrence’s own ambitions in Grand Bassa, and ties surrounding the legislation to the Albayrak Group, raise exactly the kind of conflict-of-interest questions a bill this consequential cannot afford to carry unanswered into 2028.
SET THE POLITICS ASIDE for a moment and read the statute the way this newspaper did. It creates four independent port security forces, one each for Monrovia, Buchanan, Greenville and Harper, with no shared command structure linking any of them. The regulatory Commission meant to oversee the whole decentralized system has a mandate that never once mentions trafficking or narcotics enforcement. Neither the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency nor Liberia’s Maritime Authority holds a guaranteed seat on any of the four new port boards.
THESE ARE NOT ABSTRACTIONS. They are close cousins of the exact jurisdictional seams that let the IB Atlantic IV sit off Liberia’s coast for the better part of a week this summer, chased eventually by AFL boats too small to catch it, tied to a rejected letter and a now-dismissed port official, under a single centralized system that was supposed to make accountability simple. Multiply that system by four independent authorities with no shared command, and the seams do not close. They multiply.
HERE IS THE UNCOMFORTABLE PART. A rivalry built around who controls the political and economic spoils of a decentralized port system has little natural incentive to close those seams. Four independent port authorities, each answering to a differently composed local board, are more valuable as patronage and campaign infrastructure precisely because they are fragmented — more appointments to hand out, more local relationships to cultivate ahead of 2029, more places to plant loyalists’ years before a single vote is cast.
A UNIFIED COMMAND STRUCTURE, a Commission mandate that puts trafficking enforcement in writing, and guaranteed seats for the LDEA and Maritime Authority would do the opposite: concentrate accountability, reduce the number of levers any one political patron controls, and make the whole system harder to quietly steer. We are not accusing either official of wanting Liberia’s ports to stay vulnerable to traffickers. We are saying the incentives built into this rivalry point toward leaving the gaps alone, and Liberians should not have to take it on faith that ambition and public safety happen to align this time.
THE LAW’S 18-MONTH TRANSITION PERIOD, delaying the new structure until 2028, is the one part of this bill this newspaper has consistently treated as a genuine opportunity rather than a stalling tactic. It is also the only window left to fix what the statute did not. That means the Legislature and the incoming Independent Seaport and Inland Ports Regulatory Authority owe Liberians a public, written answer to three specific questions before the transition period runs out: who commands all four port security forces when a single vessel or shipment crosses jurisdictional lines; where in the Commission’s mandate trafficking and narcotics enforcement is explicitly named as a responsibility rather than assumed as an afterthought; and which seats on each of the four port boards belong, by law, to the LDEA and the Maritime Authority rather than to whichever local board chooses to invite them. None of those fixes require reopening the political fight over decentralization itself. They require the officials who won that fight to spend some of their eighteen months finishing the job properly instead of consolidating position for 2029.
WE WOULD ASK VICE PRESIDENT KOUNG and Senate Pro Tempore Karnga-Lawrence directly: whatever this rivalry is building toward, neither of you can plausibly benefit from being remembered as the official who left a port law standing that made Liberia’s next trafficking failure easier rather than harder to prevent. The Albayrak Group ties attached to this legislation deserve a direct public accounting, not a silence that lets Liberians draw their own conclusions. And any political figure with a stake in how these four ports are eventually run has a straightforward way to prove the security gaps were oversight rather than convenience: help close them, publicly, well before 2028, regardless of what it costs a future campaign to do so.
LIBERIA SPENT THIS SUMMER learning exactly what one jurisdictional gap costs, inside a system that was still centralized. It should not need that lesson taught four times over to understand what happens when nobody outside a political rivalry is minding the space between four separate ports. The 2029 race will happen with or without this newspaper’s opinion on it. Whether it happens on top of ports that are secure is still, for eighteen months, a choice.
