A missing gun and a war of insults have swallowed the only question that actually matters: who owns US$19 million in cocaine, and why won’t anyone say? Six weeks in, both the police chief and the man leading the protests against him are asking Liberia to simply trust them. Neither has earned that yet.
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN Col. Gregory Coleman’s “Morlu, bring that gun” and Mulbah Morlu’s warning that he wants to see “the face of the assassin who pulls the trigger,” Liberia lost the plot.
SIX WEEKS AGO, this newspaper and others posed a simple question: who is behind the US$19 million cocaine shipment seized at Roberts International Airport, and why does an investigation into one of the largest drug busts in the country’s history keep moving at the pace of a man in no hurry to finish it? That question is still unanswered. It should be the only story. Instead, the nation spent Friday and the days after arguing about a gun.
WE DO NOT KNOW, and neither does the public, whether the man disarmed at Friday’s protest was an undercover police officer lawfully present or an armed provocateur planted to manufacture a pretext. Both the Inspector General and the protest’s organizers have told their version with total confidence and zero independent verification. That should trouble everyone, regardless of which side of this argument they’re inclined to believe. A police force that cannot say clearly and consistently who its own officers are, and a protest movement that cannot produce the weapon it says it’s holding “in the presence of independent witnesses,” are both, in their own way, asking the public to simply trust them. Six weeks into a case defined by a lack of trust, that is not good enough from either side.
The Right That Isn’t Actually in Dispute
LET’S BE CLEAR ABOUT ONE THING the law does not leave open to interpretation: Liberians have a constitutional right to peaceably assemble, including, as Cllr. Tiawan Gongloe rightly noted, on the grounds of the Executive Mansion, which belongs to the public and not to whichever administration currently occupies it. Declaring the compound a “no go zone” and stringing barbed wire across the approach roads is not neutral crowd management. It is a message, and the message is unmistakable: dissent is tolerated at a distance the government finds comfortable, not at the distance the Constitution actually guarantees.
PRESIDENT BOAKAI SHOULD receive the protest petition himself, as Gongloe urged. Not because doing so resolves the underlying drug case, but because refusing to do so costs the government something it can’t easily buy back: the appearance that it has nothing to hide from citizens asking, in good faith, where their US$19 million answer is.
Rhetoric Is Not a Strategy
NONE OF THAT EXCUSES the tenor coming from the protest’s own leadership. Comparing a police standoff to a scene from a war zone, invoking past police killings — however real, however unresolved, however deserving of continued scrutiny — as a personal warning to a sitting Inspector General, and describing officials as “cowards” and “criminals” in the same breath as demanding they answer for corruption does not strengthen STAND’s case. It gives the government exactly the distraction it needs. Every column inch spent parsing who threatened whom is a column inch not spent asking the LDEA why, six weeks on, the public still doesn’t have the answers it was promised on day one.
MULBAH MORLU IS NOT WRONG that Liberia has a real, documented history of police violence against protesters that has never received a satisfying accounting — Kinjor and the killing of Matthew Mulbah are neither exaggerated nor forgotten, and the state’s own responses to both have raised more questions than they’ve answered. But invoking that history as a personal threat assessment, rather than as an argument for institutional reform, converts a legitimate grievance into a shouting match the government is only too happy to have instead of the one it’s avoiding.
What Would Actually Move This Forward
THE WAY OUT OF THIS PARTICULAR SPIRAL is not complicated, even if the politics around it are. The LDEA and the National Joint Security should name, publicly and promptly, everyone connected to the June 8 seizure — financiers and facilitators, not only the couriers and clerks who have been charged so far. The police should account clearly, with evidence, for who was present and armed at Friday’s protest, rather than trading accusations through press conferences and podcasts. And STAND should hand over the weapon it says it’s holding, in the daylight and before witnesses it promised, without turning the handover into another round of point-scoring.
NONE OF THAT REQUIRES EITHER SIDE to concede the argument to the other. It only requires both to remember what this was supposed to be about. Liberia does not need another folk hero or another martyr in this story. It needs an answer to the question it started with: who owns US$19 million worth of cocaine, and why does naming them keep taking so long?
