By Sherman C. Seequeh
Let me do my duty as a good citizen this morning and warn my people about a new danger lose in our country. It is a danger written in no law book, but it is real, and Rehab Junction has just shown us how real it can be. The danger, my people, is simple: booing President Joseph Nyuma Boakai. Take it from me — it is not free.
THE LESSON OF REHAB JUNCTION
Here is how the lesson came to us. When former President George Weah returned from abroad the other day — from the United States, where he had gone to the FIFA World Cup as an official of the body fighting racism in football, and from Nigeria, where he stood as orator at the grand program of the Nigeria Bar Association — the opposition organized a welcome that shook the road. The man lives in Rehab, so it was to Rehab the crowd poured, right there by the junction where the market people sell their small small things to survive.
Now the story goes that as President Boakai’s convoy passed that junction on its way to the Executive Mansion, some in the crowd booed and taunted him. I say “some,” because that is the honest word. The videos that reached our phones show a crowd divided against itself — one mouth booing, the next mouth cheering, the way we Liberians will do.
Nobody sat down and took the names of who booed and who clapped. Nobody can tell you, hand on heart, that the ma selling her fruits and vegetables or the young man selling slippers was the one who opened his mouth against the President.
And yet. When those same peddlers came back to their stalls on Thursday morning to start their day, they did not meet their tables. They met rubble. The stalls that fed their children lay flat on the ground, the debris scattered where the goods used to sit. Somebody, in the quiet of the night, had come and taught Rehab Junction a hard lesson.
THE GOVERNMENT’S TELLING SILENCE
Now hear this part well. It is interesting, my people. Nobody from the government has stood up to tell us who sent the bulldozer, or why it came the very morning after the booing, or what the market people did to deserve it.
The government, wise as ever, has said nothing at all. But my people, we are not fools. They have done the arithmetic themselves, and they have reached an answer the government’s silence only makes louder: in this our new Liberia, you boo the President today, you find your business flat on the ground tomorrow.
METHUSELAH’S AGE, SOLOMON’S WISDOM
They tell us this President carries more than forty years of government experience. Forty years! But experience and wisdom are not the same thing, my people. As the old people say, the age of Methuselah has nothing to do with the wisdom of Solomon. A truly wise old leader, a Solomon, would have looked at that mixed-up crowd and known that you cannot punish a whole junction for the sins of a few mouths you never even identified. He would have sent somebody to find the truth, not a machine to find the tables.
And whether his own hand was in it or not, a wise father who sees his children’s livelihood scattered in the road does one thing quickly: he rushes to say sorry and to rebuild. He does not fold his arms and go silent while the market women weep over their broken stalls. That silence, more than the bulldozer itself, is what has convicted this government in the eyes of the people.
POOR PEOPLE’S BREAD ALWAYS TROUBLED IN THIS ERA
But let us stay with my warning, because Rehab is not the first lesson — it is only the freshest. Cast your eye back small. Representative Yekeh Kolubah opened his mouth against this government, and they did not answer him with argument; they answered him by pulling his very seat from under him in the House. Senators who talk too loud find themselves harassed and hounded for the crime of expressing themselves.
Homes have been broken down, private property scattered, market people and street sellers chased from the little corners where they scratch their living. Notice the pattern, my people: it is always the mouth, and always the poor man’s bread, that pays the bill of this RESCUE REGIME.
And do not imagine this careless habit with people’s livelihood began at Rehab. Cast your mind all the way back to January 2024, when this government had barely warmed its seat.
Almost overnight, thousands of civil servants — by some counts more than two thousand — were whisked off their jobs at places like the Ministry of State for Presidential Affairs and the Monrovia City Corporation, for no crime anyone could name except the suspicion that they carried sympathy for the other side. Two thousand pay envelopes closed in one breath; two thousand families told, in plain effect, that a job in Liberia now hangs not on your work but on your politics.
And where the law itself stood in its way, this government simply stepped over it. Officials protected by tenure — that legal shield our own lawmakers built precisely so that a change of government would not become a change of everybody’s bread — were pushed out all the same, the law waved aside as though it were a small thing.
Now here is exactly where those forty years should have spoken. A man with four decades in government knows better than anyone what a tenure law is for, and knows better than anyone what it costs a country when a President treats the law as an inconvenience.
If all that experience could not teach him to pause before scattering a market woman’s table, before tearing five thousand people from their salaries, or before stepping over the very statutes he swore to uphold, then we must ask, gently but honestly, what the forty years actually taught.
EVEN A BOO IS YOUR RIGHT
And this is the part that should concern every one of us, whether you love Boakai or vex with him. Our Constitution — the same book these big men swear their hands on — promises every Liberian the right to speak, to assemble, and yes, even to boo.
A boo is not a bullet. A boo is only the small sound a free people make when their heart is not happy, and in every real democracy the leader swallows it and moves on. But here, it seems, the boo has become a crime, and the sentence is your stall, your seat, or your roof.
ONE TABLE, TEN MOUTHS
Do not forget, either, what it means to knock down one small table. When you put one petty trader out of business in this country, you have not touched one person — you have pushed ten into hunger, because that one table was feeding a whole family and half a neighborhood besides. The mother at Rehab Junction was not merely selling; she was keeping children in school and rice in the pot. Scatter her tomatoes in the road, and you scatter a dozen lives along with them.
THE NEW LAW OF THE LAND
So take my warning seriously, fellow Liberians. If you value your business, guard your mouth. If you love your house, clap when they tell you to clap. If you want to keep your seat in that Capitol, sit down softly and say nothing at all. That, it appears, is the new law of our land, and Rehab Junction is where it was published.
Or — and here is the other road, the one I pray we take — we can all stop pretending this is normal. We can tell this government, plainly and together, that a leader who cannot stand a boo is a leader who has forgotten who he works for.
Forty years in government should have taught him that the people’s mouth belongs to the people, not to the President. Let him find that wisdom quickly, and go and rebuild those stalls, before the whole country learns to be afraid of its own voice.
