Your Excellency:
Our “Memo to the President” returns to these pages on the occasion of our twenty-eighth anniversary, and it returns in the plain-spoken temper that first earned it a name. A newspaper that has kept the national watch for twenty-eight years does the head of state no favor by flattering him. It owes him the truth as it finds it, and owes the reader an honest account of whether that truth is heeded. We write also because the calendar has thrown our anniversary and your mid-term into the same season, and a nation may fairly take stock of both at once.
Permit us to begin where our last memo ended. That memo was addressed to your predecessor, on the eve of the 2023 elections, and its burden was that he let the people’s verdict stand. He did; power changed hands in peace; and Liberia proved it could govern its own succession. You inherited that proof, Mr. President — and with it the harder task of showing that a peaceful transfer was worth the having.
Two-and-a-half years on, the ledger is mixed, and candor requires us to say so. You declared drug and substance abuse a national public health emergency, and we credited the courage of naming the plague aloud. But a declaration is not a cure. The kush and the cocaine still flow; our young people still waste in the cemeteries and on the street corners, the “zogos” whom the nation has learned to step over rather than save.
Your enforcers arrest by the thousand and convict by the handful — the financiers untouched, the boys at the bottom paraded for the cameras. Ban one poison and another rises to take its place; the traffickers adapt faster than the state that pursues them. When cocaine moves through Roberts International Airport by the container, and officials of your own government are named in the trafficking, the emergency you declared has plainly outrun the response you mounted. We ask you, Mr. President, in the name of a generation you vowed not to lose: where is the follow-through?
Nor can the household afford your patience. The market woman counts her loss at day’s end; the price of a cup of rice governs more Liberian homes than any statute; the graduate you educated has no work to which to carry his certificate.
Idleness, Mr. President, is the recruiting sergeant of the very ghettos your emergency was meant to empty; want and the drug den feed upon each other. As the traditional donors retreat and the budget tightens, these hardships will not wait on committees and roadmaps. The ordinary Liberian did not vote for the promise of relief in some later year. He voted to eat.
We say all this, Your Excellency, not to diminish what your administration has attempted, but to insist that attempt is not achievement. The reckoning you began with the war and economic crimes — the courts now stalled at the Legislature, the accountability office short of the money you pledged it — will be measured by the same standard: not the eloquence of its launching, but the courage of its finish.
So too the press freedoms you inherited, which require an active guardian in the Executive Mansion and not a grateful heir.
The nation is watching, Mr. President, and history is a stern clerk. It will not record your speeches. It will record whether the drugs receded, whether the household ate, whether the powerful answered for their crimes — and whether the man who inherited a peaceful transfer left the country stronger than he found it. That is the memo. We offer it, as always, in the plain hope of a better Liberia.
Thank you for your attention.