When the very people who should ask the questions are the ones now facing them
When a country catches the biggest drug haul in its whole history — tons of cocaine, hundreds of millions of dollars, poison heading straight for our own children — there is one simple thing every serious nation does: to summon and mandate investigators.
You call for your cleanest people, the ones nobody can point a finger at, and you put them on the case until the truth comes out plain. Now, let us do the sensible thing. Let us send for the clean probers. But here is our small Liberian problem: when we go to call them, we find they are already in the room. Not holding the files. Their own names are in the file.
THE ONES WHO SHOULD ASK ARE THE ONES BEING ASKED
Look at how we set this thing up. The man who heads the police, the man who is supposed to lead the hunt, is the same man whose own officers — by his own mouth — drove escort for the cocaine, one police car in front and one behind.
The minister who sits over the police and runs the whole investigation is the same minister whose own car, whose ministry’s different-different stories, and whose strange vehicle deal a senator of this Republic has now stood up in public and said: please, bring the documents, stop giving us only mouth.
Now hear me well, because I don’t want anybody to twist my words. I am not saying any man is guilty. That is for the court to decide, and I leave it right there. I am only asking you to look at the shape of the thing. The very watchmen we put on the wall are the same people the crowd down below is pointing at. We have asked the questioned ones to do the questioning. And now they are facing their own set of questions.
COMMITTEE TO PROBE THE COMMITTEE
It now looks like the way this thing is going, tomorrow we will need a committee to investigate the committee, and then a fresh committee to investigate that one — until everybody who is investigating is himself standing in the dock, and nobody clean is left outside to tell us, once and for all, what happened to the cocaine.
And this same government cannot even keep its own story straight, yet it wants us to trust it. One side of the government tells us the police cars came from a Dutch health company.
Another side, just a few days later, tells us the cars came from an American dealer. A government that cannot agree with itself on where it bought common cars now wants us to believe it can find the truth about four tons of poison? They want us to drink the whole ocean, but they cannot even agree what color the cup is.
WE RICH IN EVERYTHING BUT ONE THING
See what kind of country we have turned into — rich all of a sudden, rich in everything. Rich in cocaine, when before we were just poor. Rich in task force. Rich in press statement they release at midnight. Rich in denial. Rich in “person of interest” who somehow still catches his flight and gone. Rich in confession that leads nowhere. We have every single thing a big investigation could want. We are short of only one thing: one clean hand to hold the file.
Send somebody all around the block, from Waterside to Congo Town, in broad daylight, looking not even for a saint — just for one prober that nobody can probe back. Watch how far the person will walk. Watch the sun go down on him, still walking, still looking, his hand still empty.
BUT THIS THING IS NOT FUNNY
I have been smiling small as I write this, because the whole thing is so ridiculous it can make you laugh. But let me put the smile down now, because under it there is nothing to laugh about. While we are sitting down arguing over who is clean enough to ask the questions, the drug is not waiting. It is not waiting for our committee to be fixed, or our minister to be cleared. It is out there eating our young people — in the ghetto, on the corner, behind the market — one child at a time.
Every week we waste deciding who to trust with the lamp is one free week we hand to the dealers. A country that cannot find even one clean investigator for its biggest crime is not just shamed. It is naked. It is a house that finds out, right in the middle of the robbery, that its own watchman is a stranger.
THE ONE WAY OUT
There is a way out, and it is not clever, just honest. When the people who are supposed to handle the case are themselves inside the case, you have to reach past them and find a hand that is clean — an independent body that owes nothing to the men under question, one that can follow the money and the cocaine wherever they run, and report to the people, not to the mansion. The GAC. The anti-corruption commission. The financial intelligence people. Any clean hand the tangled-up ones cannot reach.
Until we find that hand, let us stop fooling ourselves. The file will stay open, because there is no clean finger to turn its pages. And somewhere tonight, while the watchmen are busy explaining their cars, a small boy in one of our towns is buying the very thing that will kill him — from a trade that nobody we still trust is in any position to stop.
So I ask you plain, my people: are there no more clean probers on the block? Because Liberia is perishing while we stand here looking.
