MONROVIA – Liberia has beaten existential threats before, and Dr. Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo argues its deepening drug crisis can fall the same way. In a public commentary, he traces collective power from the Rice Riot through the women’s peace movement to the Ebola fight. His argument is that unity, not any institution, decides whether that collective power builds the nation or destroys it. The fight against narcotics, he contends, cannot rest on the President, the drug agency, the police or the courts alone. It must instead become a shared national struggle uniting communities, schools, families and faith leaders across the country. Addicts, he adds, deserve treatment and recovery rather than rejection. THE ANALYST reports.
Dr. Emmanuel King Urey Yarkpawolo has called on Liberians to confront the country’s escalating drug crisis through collective national action, arguing that the fight cannot be left to the President and state institutions alone. In a wide-ranging commentary, he maintained that the same unity which carried the nation through war and disease can now be turned against narcotics.
Yarkpawolo framed the drug emergency as the latest in a long line of national challenges whose outcome, for better or worse, has been shaped by the collective will of ordinary citizens. He argued that Liberia’s history offers repeated proof that mass action can either rebuild the country or tear it apart.
LESSONS FROM LIBERIA’S PAST
Tracing that history, Yarkpawolo pointed to the 1979 Rice Riot, which began as opposition to a proposed increase in the price of rice and escalated into a national political crisis. He said the unrest exposed deep social and economic inequalities and helped set the stage for the 1980 coup that ended more than a century of Americo-Liberian political dominance.
He offered a similar reading of the armed rebellion launched by Charles Taylor and Prince Y. Johnson in 1989, noting that early cooperation from frustrated citizens helped the insurgency spread. What some hoped would bring liberation, he said, instead produced fourteen years of war, displacement and death. “When Liberians unite around a common cause, their collective actions can produce enormous consequences — for good or for evil,” Yarkpawolo wrote.
WHEN UNITY SAVED LIBERIA
But collective action, he stressed, has also rescued the nation. He credited the women’s peace movement led by Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee, in which Christian and Muslim women crossed religious and ethnic lines to press the warring parties toward the 2003 peace agreement.
Yarkpawolo, who lived through the 2014 Ebola outbreak, said the epidemic offered the clearest modern example of unity overcoming catastrophe. He recalled that fear, denial and misinformation initially allowed the virus to spread before communities, health workers, religious leaders and international partners combined their efforts.
Through what he described as collective discipline and sacrifice, Liberians accepted public-health measures, abandoned unsafe burial practices and supported affected families until the virus was contained. He said similar principles later guided the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A GROWING NATIONAL EMERGENCY
Turning to the present, Yarkpawolo warned that the drug crisis is now destroying young men and women across streets, schools and communities. He cautioned that Liberia risks losing an entire generation while, in his words, greedy and wicked individuals profit from the suffering of the vulnerable.
He insisted the response must extend well beyond President Joseph Nyuma Boakai, the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency (LDEA), the police and the courts. Government institutions must prosecute traffickers without political interference, he said, while communities, schools, families and religious leaders each carry part of the burden.
‘NO HIDING PLACE’
Yarkpawolo demanded that traffickers face the full weight of the law regardless of wealth, political connection or community ties. He argued that no offender should be shielded simply because they are powerful or familiar.
“There must be no hiding place for drug traffickers and their collaborators,” he wrote, while urging that those battling addiction be offered treatment and rehabilitation rather than rejection. The victims of the crisis, he said, need help, not condemnation.
Recalling the nation’s victories over war and Ebola, Yarkpawolo expressed confidence that drugs, too, can be defeated. He appealed to citizens to expose traffickers through lawful reporting, protect their communities and stand together behind what he called a righteous cause.
“When Liberia’s people unite behind a righteous cause, even the greatest challenge can be defeated,” he wrote. Through sustained collective action, courage and accountability, he concluded, the day can come when the drug crisis is history in Liberia.