President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia generally moved toward greater media openness and supported efforts to reform restrictive speech laws, but the Rodney Sieh/FrontPage Africa case remains an important contradiction: Sieh was convicted of libel in 2011, faced a very large damages award, was imprisoned in 2013, and FrontPageAfrica was temporarily closed.
President George Weah then deepened reforms begun under President Sirleaf by submitting and signing the Kamara Abdullah Kamara (KAK) Act, repealing criminal libel against the President, sedition and criminal malevolence.
The significance of the KAK Act of 2019 is that it removed criminal penalties that could previously be used against political expression. President Weah explicitly connected the reform to Article 15 of the Constitution and the Table Mountain Declaration, arguing that the old provisions impeded freedom of speech and expression.
For President Boakai, he has publicly reaffirmed the Table Mountain principle. In September 2026, President Boakai said journalists should continue questioning, investigating, criticizing and holding public institutions accountable, and specifically invoked the principles of the Table Mountain Declaration, including freedom of expression, access to information and an independent media. But these words are not backed by actions.
Instead, we see an unrelenting attempt to degrade the free-speech environment under the Rescue Mission.
What is now emerging is that the recently approved Cybercrime Act is now being used as an instrument against political online expression.
We are not against the law in its attempt to punish malicious cyber harm against individuals. Those who do cyber fraud must be punished. If someone wrote that “I will kill or harm Mr. X” that individual must face the law.
We are against using the law to silence political ridicule or to punish political lampoon and satire which are protected forms of speech. The AI generated photo of Vice President Koung is a lampoon that aimed to depict Brussels airport security asking him to remove his shirt. Whether he removed his shirt or not is not the issue.
A critic can imagine his shirt out and draw an image to make a political point. And what might that political point be? When you falsely imprison a former vice president on bogus charges of drug trafficking, you open the current vice president to stricter security searches that could be the object of satire or lampoon. This is especially true since the $19 million drug bust has provided evidence that drugs have been moving from the RIA through Brussels airport.
So, the EPS Director Sam Gaye is wrong for saying the arrest of the young man was on grounds that he used a digitally manipulated material to “insult, humiliate, threaten or harass “the Vice President. The image derives from a factual situation at an airport and satire, and political lampoon need NOT be factual in their exaggeration or depictions of cartoons on politicians.
Once VP Koung was asked to remove his shirt, several different images could follow from that fact. Using or spreading such images online poses no harm to the VP neither does it insult or threaten him. There have been several images depicting opposition figures in all kinds of manner. Are we going to pursue the Liberians who created these images as well? We shouldn’t.
The critics who develop these images need not care about the facts they depict as long as there is a semblance of a factual situation they are looking to depict to make their political points.
Once there is some political noise on an issue, they are protected under the Liberian constitution to run wild with imaginative imagery to make their various arguments through cartoons or satires, irrespective of what facts eventually emerge from these political happenings.
If the intent of the Cybercrime law is to silence criticism or stifle critical political creativity, then it must be repealed or revised to ensure no government uses it as an instrument against online satire or expression. Let’s stop the national bleeding on freedom of speech!
