Give The Investigation A Chance -Then Hold It To Its Word

PRESIDENT JOSEPH NYUMA Boakai’s nationwide address on Tuesday addressing the seizure of approximately 237.6 kilograms of cocaine at Roberts International Airport was, by any honest measure, the right address delivered at the right moment. The seizure, with an estimated street value exceeding nineteen million United States dollars, ranks among the largest narcotics interdictions in Liberia’s history. The public reaction it has produced — equal parts alarm, suspicion, and demand for answers — is entirely understandable. This newspaper shares much of that public unease. But unease is not the same thing as proof of a cover-up, and impatience is not a substitute for an investigation. The President has asked the Liberian people for something reasonable: time, discipline, and calm while the National Joint Security and the institutions under it do the work. This editorial believes that request deserves to be honored, even as we insist that it eventually be matched with results.

SKEPTICISM ABOUT GOVERNMENT investigations in Liberia is not irrational. It is earned, built over years of cases that opened with fanfare and closed with silence. Liberians who hear a presidential pledge of accountability and respond with a raised eyebrow are not being unpatriotic. They are being realistic, drawing on a long memory of promises that went nowhere. This newspaper has, on more than one occasion, been among the loudest voices demanding that such promises be kept. We do not abandon that posture now. But there is a difference between healthy skepticism and reflexive cynicism that refuses, on principle, to credit any official statement with good faith before the facts are even gathered. The President’s address was specific. He named the lead institutions: the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency, the Liberia National Police, the National Security Agency, the Financial Intelligence Agency, Liberia Immigration Service, Customs, Airport Security, and the Ministry of Justice. He committed to two fronts of investigation — the individuals connected to this specific shipment, and the wider criminal enterprise behind it. He stated plainly that the inquiry would follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of whether it touches private citizens, public officials, financiers, or foreign actors. Those are not vague reassurances. They are specific commitments against which performance can, and must, be measured.

THE PRESIDENT IS also correct on a point that often gets lost in the noise of public pressure: investigations are not improved by narrating themselves in real time. Premature disclosure does not satisfy public curiosity without cost. It tips off suspects, destroys evidence, compromises cooperating witnesses, and can collapse a prosecution before it ever reaches a courtroom. A government that leaked every lead and every name under public pressure would not be more accountable. It would simply be less effective, and the people ultimately responsible for trafficking 237.6 kilograms of cocaine through Roberts International Airport would be the primary beneficiaries of that recklessness. Demanding operational transparency at every hour of an active narcotics investigation is not a demand for accountability. It is, however unintentionally, a demand that risks helping the guilty escape it.

NONE OF THIS, however, is a blank check. This newspaper’s support for patience during the investigative phase comes with a condition the President himself has already accepted in his own address: that information will be shared with the public at appropriate stages, and that no person and no institution will be shielded from scrutiny. Those are his words, not ours, and we intend to hold his administration to them with the same seriousness we would apply to any other public commitment. If, in the weeks ahead, this investigation produces nothing — no arrests beyond a courier or two, no names of the financiers and facilitators the President promised to expose, no accounting of how 237.6 kilograms of a Class A narcotic moved through a national airport without detection until the very end — then the patience this newspaper is asking the public to extend today will have been misplaced, and we will say so plainly and without hesitation.

TO THE CYNICS among our readers, and there are many, and they are not wrong to exist: your skepticism is the product of a political history that has earned it. But channel that skepticism into vigilance, not paralysis. Watch this investigation closely. Demand the updates the President has promised. Ask hard questions when the appropriate stage for disclosure arrives, and ask them louder if that stage never comes. That is the proper role of an engaged citizenry, and it is the proper role of this newspaper. What serves no one — not the public, not justice, not the fight against narcotics trafficking that the President rightly called a fight for the future of Liberia’s young people — is a chorus of doubt so loud and so immediate that it drowns out the investigation before it has had a chance to produce a single result.

THIS NEWSPAPER WILL be watching. We will ask the questions the public deserves answered, at the time those answers can responsibly be given. We will report what the investigation finds, and we will report just as forcefully if it finds nothing at all. For now, we join the President in asking the Liberian people for what every serious investigation requires: patience, not silence; vigilance, not noise. Give it the chance to work. Then hold it to every word it promised.