Letter from Saclepea : Not in My Name: A Stand Against Tribal Politics

-By Musa Hassan Bility

Dear Fellow Liberians,

No child is born hating.

No one enters this world already suspicious of another tribe or hostile to another faith.

Hate is taught. Division is engineered. And in Liberia, too many have learned it too well.

We have allowed tribe and religion to become weapons in our politics — not tools of identity, but instruments of exclusion. We have chosen names over merit, dialects over vision, and fear over unity. And because of that, good people are kept out, while the wrong ones rise.

I write to you from Saclepea not in anger, but with urgent conviction: not in my name.

I will not excuse failure because the leader shares my blood.

I will not defend injustice because the thief speaks my dialect.

I will not be silent because the abuser kneels in my place of worship.

I have seen the damage — not in theory, but in the eyes of young people turned against their neighbors. In clinics that never open, roads that never get built, schools that never teach — all because we keep voting for “our own,” even when “our own” is failing us all.

Let me be clear: I love my people. I am proud of my roots.

But I did not enter public life to serve a tribe. I entered to serve a nation.

Liberia does not need tribal defenders. Liberia needs national builders.

We cannot build a country if we are afraid of each other.

We cannot develop if we judge a person’s worth by their surname or their place of worship.

We cannot heal if we keep injecting the poisons of suspicion and exclusion into our democracy.

This is not just about me. This is about all of us — and the kind of country we want to leave behind.

If we continue down this path, we will wake up in a Liberia that no longer belongs to all of us.

If we keep empowering tribalism with our silence, we will soon have nothing left to call a nation.

So today, I raise my voice not just for myself, but for every Liberian who dreams of something better:

Let us reject the politics of fear.

Let us stop rewarding failure with blind loyalty.

Let us teach our children pride without prejudice — and identity without hate.

To the leaders who divide us: your time is ending.

To the citizens who’ve been silent: your voice is needed now.

To the young, the poor, the overlooked: this country is yours to reclaim.

Liberia must rise — not as Gio or Kpelle, Mandingoe or Kru — but as one wounded people determined to heal. We are better than this. We must be.

Not in my name.

Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.