By Sidiki Fofana | Truth in Ink
Yesterday, both Okay FM and Spoon Network released a statement attributed to Cllr. Tiawan Gongloe, in which he expressed his position on the upcoming Popular People’s Protest scheduled for July 15–17.
At a time when the Liberian people are bracing themselves to confront rising tyranny, deepening poverty, and worsening governance, it is disheartening, if not outright shameful, for a man once regarded as a justice activist to now suggest we conform to the very ills we are rising up against. To embrace political passivity in the language of caution, and dismiss a nationwide cry for justice with the trivial excuse that the protest is being led by individuals who once contributed to our national challenges, is more than hypocrisy. It is betrayal.
The Honorable Cllr. must do more than merely acknowledge that the conditions of our people have worsened. To choose silence as a form of political convenience because those now daring to challenge the ruling establishment once bore the stains of past missteps is nothing short of complicity. In moments like these, silence is not neutrality. It is an endorsement of the status quo and the suffering it breeds.
You cannot claim moral out rightness while having supported Ellen Johnson Sir leaf, a known financier of Liberia’s brutal civil war, the darkest and most destructive chapter in our national history, and yet now refuse to stand with those protesting injustice today, on grounds that they too are flawed. That is not principle. That is selective outrage cloaked in cowardice.
This brand of moral inconsistency, where one overlooks war crimes but refuses to support protest against economic collapse and systemic decay, is not only intellectually dishonest; it is morally bankrupt and a stable to Justice.
If past flaws disqualified anyone from fighting for justice, then no revolution would have ever been born. Progress has always been carried on the shoulders of imperfect men and women willing to stand up when others chose comfort.
Consider Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso. A former military officer, Sankara didn’t wait to be sanctified by public opinion before confronting corruption, inequality, and imperial exploitation. He acted.
“You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness,” he once declared.
Contrast him with Leopold Senghor of Senegal, just like you, a brilliant poet and statesman whose gradualism, though poetic, failed to radically restructure the inequalities he inherited. History remembers both, but only one is etched in the hearts of revolutionaries.
Even Nelson Mandela, once branded a terrorist and imprisoned for nearly three decades, embraced resistance despite flaws and contradictions. If the world had waited for a perfect freedom fighter, apartheid would still be alive.
And closer to home, Gabriel Baccus Matthews, a man both revered and controversial, dared to shatter a century-old Americo-Liberian political monopoly, not because he was perfect, but because he had the courage to act when others hid behind calculation.
As Frantz Fanon declared:
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
(The Wretched of the Earth, 1961)
Those who find excuses in the past to ignore the pain of the present are not fulfilling that mission, they are betraying it. To deny this fight simply because the messengers are not immaculate is to allow injustice to fester.
Even the moral giant Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned of this form of passive complicity:
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
(The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967)
It is that silence, sanitized, calculated, and complicit that now echoes louder than the cries of the hungry. When you criticize protest not on the basis of its cause but its carriers, you are not defending virtue. You are defending power. You are helping injustice breathe.
And let us not forget the charge of Angela Davis, who so boldly declared:
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
(Speech, 2014)
Liberia does not need perfect voices. It needs courageous ones. It needs citizens who are unafraid to confront oppression, even when the path is messy. The time for silence has passed. Our suffering is too deep, our future too fragile. And history, be it kind or damning will remember where each of us stood. And you shall be on the wrong side of it.
