A strange complaint is going around. We are being told, by voices close to power, that Liberians should stop politicizing the drug war — that the endless media reports and market-corner arguments are undermining the fight. Let me say plainly what should be obvious: it is the exact opposite. The noise is not undermining the fight. The noise is the fight. Nearly everything we now know, we know because ordinary people refused to be quiet.
SILENCE IS WHERE THESE CASES GO TO DIE
Think honestly for one moment. Every officer who has been dismissed, every official who has been named, every commander pulled from his post — how did their names reach daylight? Not because the system volunteered them. They came out because journalists kept asking, because talk shows kept the subject alive, because ordinary citizens on Facebook and in the market would not let it drop. Even the mainstream press has admitted this: the President’s dismissals came only after weeks of mounting public pressure, after the local media compelled the joint security to come clean and name the suspects. The pressure produced the names. Silence would have produced nothing.
We have seen what silence does to a drug case in this country. We saw it with the Freeport case — a hundred million dollars’ worth of trouble that went quiet, dragged through the courts, and ended in acquittal. That is the model. That is what happens when the noise stops. A drug case in Liberia does not die from too much attention. It dies from too little. To ask the population to go silent now is not to protect the fight. It is to hand the guilty back the darkness they need to work in.
MORE ARRESTS IS NOT MORE VIRTUE
Now to the boast we keep hearing — that this government must be the better drug-fighter, because under it more drugs are seized, more officials dismissed, more people indicted than under the government before it. It sounds convincing until you hold it up to the light. Then it falls apart.
Consider what we have learned. A confidential intelligence report is said to have reached the President in September of last year — nine months before the airport seizure — warning in plain words that Liberia was drifting toward becoming a narco-state, that trafficking networks had penetrated our security institutions. If that warning is real, then this government did not stumble bravely upon a hidden evil.
It was told. It was warned nine months ahead, and the powder still moved, still grew, still built its warehouse, until it reached three hundred and seventeen million dollars in a single seizure at Duazon. You do not get to claim the glory of discovery for a fire you were warned about and let burn.
And there is a simpler answer to the boast, and it comes from inside the government itself. The Justice Minister has said plainly that success will be measured not by dramatic arrests but by successful prosecutions. He is right — and in saying so he has quietly taken the government’s own trophy off the shelf. Arrests are not the scoreboard. A seizure is only the beginning of a case, not the winning of it.
Ask instead the question that matters: how many of these big cases have ended in a conviction that reached the financier? Until that number stops being zero, more arrests is not proof of a cleaner government. It may only be proof of a bigger problem.
WHY DO OUR OWN OFFICERS KEEP TURNING UP ON THE WRONG SIDE?
So let us set aside the childish quarrel of which party fights drugs better, and ask the question the evidence actually forces on us. Why do senior men of our own security services keep turning up on the wrong side of the cargo? A chief of crime services removed for allegedly taking ten thousand American dollars. Officers of the security agency behind bars.
And the report, printed in our own press, that the Duazon cocaine was escorted through several stages by senior police before it was caught. Read that word again — escorted. An escort is not an enforcer. A police vehicle guarding a drug shipment is not a police vehicle fighting drugs.
This is the real reason the pandemic is spreading so fast and holding the government so tight. It is not spreading in spite of the state. It is spreading, in part, through men who wear the state’s uniform. That is a far more serious thing than any party quarrel, and no amount of boasting about arrest figures can cover it.
ARE WE BECOMING A NARCO-STATE? YES — AND WE SHOULD SAY SO
Which brings me to the question the whole country is now circling but few will answer straight. Is Liberia becoming a narco-state? I will answer it plainly, in my own voice, because dancing around it helps no one. Yes. We are on that road, and we are further down it than our leaders are willing to admit.
A narco-state is not a country where drugs pass through. Drugs pass through many honest countries. A narco-state is a country where the drug trade has bought a share of the state itself — where the men paid to stop the powder are found moving it, guarding it, or looking away from it for a fee. By that definition the warning signs are not on the horizon; they are already inside the house.
When a crime chief is caught with the cartel’s money, when police escort the cargo, when a written warning of exactly this danger sits ignored for nine months, we are not debating a distant risk. We are describing a present condition. To pretend otherwise is not patriotism. It is the very silence that let us get here.
And if you want the plainest picture of how far down this road we have travelled, look out to sea this very week. A forty-one-year-old cargo ship, the IB Atlantic IV — a vessel a dismissed airport official had earlier tried to bring into our own Freeport under a story about propeller damage — is at this hour drifting off our coast, suspected of carrying who-knows-what, and our forces cannot catch it. Our own military says so openly: the coast guard boats were never built to go that far out, they turned back and slept in Buchanan, and we have had to beg Nigeria for help just to keep the ship in sight.
Worse, soldiers are said to have posted video of the chase to Facebook as it began — handing the crew the warning they needed to run. A nation that cannot police the water in front of its own capital, that watches a suspect ship sail away because its boats signal them to turn back, is not a nation in full control of its own coast. And a coast no one controls is the open door through which a narco-state is furnished. Nothing about that ship’s cargo has yet been proven — but the spectacle of the chase has already proven something larger about us.
And notice — this is the moment they choose to ask us to lower our voices. Not by accident. A country slides into narco-statehood quietly, in the dark, while the honest are told to stop making noise and trust the process. The single strongest defense a nation has against that slide is a population that will not shut up: that keeps asking, keeps naming, keeps refusing to let the case go cold. Our noise is not the disease. Our noise is the immune system.
So to those who say citizens are politicizing the drug war, I say this. They are not politicizing it. They are the reason it is being fought at all. Take away the media, take away the market arguments, take away the citizen who will not be quiet, and every one of these cases returns to the grave the Freeport case was buried in.
Keep talking, Liberia. Keep asking. The day we go silent is the day the cartel wins — not in the courtroom, but in the comfortable quiet they have been asking us for all along.
