The Cocaine Scandal Now Demands Independent Answers

SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED this week, and its significance should not be lost in the noise it will surely generate. The Secretary General of Liberia’s largest opposition party wrote to the Embassy of the United States asking a foreign power to help investigate the sitting Inspector General of Police. Whatever one makes of Jefferson Koijee’s motives, and they will be furiously debated, the letter itself is a measure of something this newspaper has warned about repeatedly: public confidence in the domestic handling of the US$19 million cocaine scandal has collapsed to the point where a senior political figure believes answers can only come from outside.

LET US BE precise about what the letter is and what it is not. It is a compendium of allegations, many of them hedged in Koijee’s own careful language of “in my view,” “reportedly,” and “I am informed.” It is not evidence, and THE ANALYST has not independently verified its claims. Koijee is also not a disinterested observer; he is a partisan actor whose party stands to gain from the government’s embarrassment, and readers should weigh his charges with that squarely in mind. An allegation does not become true because it is grave, and a police chief is not guilty because an opponent has named him in a letter to a diplomat.

BUT HERE IS what the government must understand: the letter’s most striking feature is its specificity, and specific claims are checkable claims. Koijee does not deal in vague insinuation. He names ten Toyota Hilux vehicles allegedly distributed without General Services Agency registration. He names seven Chevrolet Tahoes and lists, official by official, where he says they went, up to and including the presidential convoy. He cites the Inspector General’s travel dates and the police budget down to the dollar. Every one of these claims can be confirmed or demolished with documents the government already possesses. GSA registration records exist or they do not. Procurement files for the vehicles in official convoys exist or they do not. Travel manifests exist. If the allegations are false, the state has in its hands the fastest and most devastating rebuttal available anywhere: the paper trail. Publish it.

THAT IS WHY the government’s response in the coming days will tell Liberians more than the letter itself. There are two paths. The first is the one this administration has walked too often in this scandal: denunciation of the messenger, appeals to patriotism, and briefings that answer everything except the questions asked. Only days ago, this newspaper cautioned, through the warning of veteran journalist Gabriel I.H. Williams, that a government which cannot communicate ends up fighting its critics instead. A furious response that produces no documents will convince no one, and it will hand Koijee’s letter more credibility than it may deserve. The second path is disclosure: account for the vehicles, publish the records, explain the travel, and, above all, submit the entire cocaine investigation to scrutiny that does not depend on the very officials whose conduct is in question.

FOR BENEATH THE named individuals lies a structural problem that stands regardless of whether any single allegation survives examination. The repeated placement of senior Liberia National Police officers at the head of the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency is a genuine governance defect. An agency created to investigate drug trafficking independently cannot be credibly led, again and again, by officers drawn from and answerable to the police hierarchy it may one day need to investigate. That arrangement would be unwise even if every official involved were beyond reproach. In the middle of the gravest narcotics scandal in the country’s recent history, it is indefensible.

A WORD, TOO, for Mr. Koijee. Allegations of this gravity carry duties as well as rights. If he possesses evidence, the place for it is before investigators, domestic or international, under oath and subject to testing, not solely in the diplomatic post. Liberia cannot be governed by dueling accusations, and the opposition should want a credible process as much as the government should, because a process credible enough to convict is also credible enough to acquit.

OUR POSITION, THEN, is the one we suspect most Liberians hold. Establish an independent investigative mechanism for the US$19 million case, domestically anchored but internationally supported if that is what public confidence now requires, with published terms of reference and the authority to follow the evidence wherever it leads. No official should be beyond its reach, and no official should be condemned before it reports. The scandal has become, exactly as Koijee says and exactly as this page has said before him, a test of whether the Liberian state is willing to be examined. The government did not choose this test. But it must now pass it, and the only passing grade is the truth, documented and delivered in public.