Every government writes two records at once. One, it announces roads commissioned, investments celebrated, reforms proclaimed. The other it accumulates quietly, in the treatment of its critics and the manner in which it turns the machinery of the state against citizens who dare to disagree. It is this second record that history ultimately consults. And on that ledger, the Unity Party government of President Joseph Nyuma Boakai is compiling entries that should trouble every Liberian who remembers where the road of official intolerance once led this country.
THE LEDGER OF INTOLERANCE
Consider the record barely into the administration’s third year. First, reports indicate that nearly eight hundred workers at the Ministry of State for Presidential Affairs alone were dismissed to make room for partisans — part of a broader purge in which employees were shown the door not for incompetence, but for the sin of having been hired by someone else. Tenured officials, whose positions the law deliberately insulated from politics, were forcefully removed or had their ouster negotiated, as though statutory tenure were a bargaining chip rather than a legal shield.
Then came the critics. Justin Oldpa Yeazehn — Prophet Key — was sentenced to six months for contempt, a message to every irreverent voice about the price of speaking. Representative Yekeh Kolubah was expelled from the House in a proceeding so clouded that a lawmaker later denied signing the very resolution bearing his signature, forcing the Supreme Court to weigh in on due process. And Senator Amara Konneh — a man who helped build the party’s path to power — became the subject of investigation demands the moment his commentary grew inconvenient.
Nor has the intolerance spared the ordinary: protesters and students met with force, market women beaten in the streets, whole communities bulldozed. The common thread is unmistakable — citizens exercising constitutional rights to speak, assemble and dissent have learned those guarantees are honored chiefly in their breach.
THE ANATOMY OF ENTITLEMENT
What explains the pattern? A demonstrable, deep-seated sense of entitlement. The Unity Party did not come to power as strangers to it; its leading figures governed for twelve years under Sirleaf and waited six more, returning in 2024 with the air of proprietors reclaiming an estate. In that mentality the state is not a trust held for all Liberians but an inheritance for the faithful. Public employment becomes patronage; criticism becomes trespass; opposition becomes ingratitude.
THE TWEAH VERDICT: WHEN THE STATE CANNOT TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER
Nowhere is that entitlement laid barer than in the government’s response to the acquittal of former Finance Minister Samuel D. Tweah. On May 8, 2026, a jury acquitted Tweah and comptroller Moses Cooper of all charges in the US$6.2 million economic sabotage case — while convicting a former acting justice minister and a former national security adviser in the same breath. A jury doing the government’s bidding acquits no one. This one discriminated, defendant by defendant, on the evidence. That is not the signature of tampering; it is the signature of conscience.
The state could not take no for an answer. Prosecutors alleged jury tampering, and a not-guilty verdict was suddenly suspended between acquittal and annulment. Yet the tampering narrative collapsed into something smaller: all fifteen jurors, including the three complainants, swore no outside force moved them, and the alleged misconduct shrank to sequestration breaches — phones, personal calls, gossip about a juror’s romance. Nobody was shown to have been bought or threatened.
None of that restraint survived the government’s determination. On July 21, 2026, Judge Ousman Feika of Criminal Court “C” ruled and moved to set aside the acquittal — despite the court finding no evidence linking Tweah or his lawyers to any misconduct. Read that again: no evidence against the defendant, yet the verdict is to be undone. Tweah branded it a “kangaroo ruling,” declared that no judge, justice or president can alter his acquittal, and accused the Vice President of personally instructing the judge — a charge the government has not answered. And reports now circulating suggest the state’s appetite may extend to the jurors themselves.
In a functioning democracy, an acquittal is the one verdict the state must simply accept. The jury is the citizen’s last shield; to turn prosecution against it is to announce that jurors are free to reach only the verdicts the government likes.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE LIBERIAN SUN
Here is the most sobering truth: none of this is new. Mass dismissals to reward the faithful, the jailing of irritating voices, the manipulation of process against opponents, force against protesters, the state as party property — everyone was perfected by the governments of yesteryear—the dark period of the country’s history. Those were the accelerants of 1979, when the denial of peaceful protest turned a demonstration over rice into a massacre; the signature of the Doe years; and, in sum, the kindling from which fourteen years of civil war caught fire. And Charles Taylor’s national nightmare. Those governments, too, mistook a frightened silence for consent.
Luck Is Not a Governing Strategy
If this government has sailed freely despite conduct indistinguishable from its notorious predecessors mentioned supra, it owes that passage not to virtue but to two strokes of fortune: a people weary of war, and an opposition that has stayed peaceful, un-greedy for power, and meek. An expelled Kolubah went to court, not the bush. But luck is not a strategy. War-weariness is a finite inheritance; the young now being beaten at protests carry no memory of Monrovia starving, and their patience is merely the patience of the moment.
A writer once warned that too much denial of a guaranteed right is sure to lead to revolution — a brutal one, in which the innocent suffers alongside the guilty.
I do not desire, predict or countenance such an outcome, and I pray the nation never again approaches it. But precisely because we remember, I am obligated to say plainly: the road this government travels is a known road, with a known destination, and the smoothness of the journey says everything about the passengers and nothing about the driver.
Stop treating employment as spoils. Let critics speak. Let courts protect verdicts rather than dismantle them. Govern as though the Constitution were a covenant, not an inconvenience. Borrowed patience, like all borrowed things, eventually comes in due season.
Let’s beware!
