Set Aside the Egos and Make Collaboration Possible for Once—Your Bases Deserve It!

For the better part of two decades, Liberia’s opposition has told the electorate a story it can no longer afford to repeat. It is the story of leaders who gather with fanfare, sign communiques with flourish, and pose for the cameras— and then walk away the moment the question of who leads is placed on the table. Sunday’s roundtable at the Jamaica Resort, convened by the Congress for Democratic Change and presided over by former President George Weah, was the latest chapter. What it produced was modest: a steering committee and a promise to write a framework. What it must not become is another entry in a long ledger of failure.

Liberians remember that ledger well. In 2016, opposition leaders met in Ganta and pledged to work together ahead of the 2017 elections, only for that pledge to dissolve. Three years later came the Collaborating Political Parties, a genuinely promising vehicle that secured a common platform before internal rivalries and competing ambitions tore it apart. Each collapse carried the same autopsy report: not a failure of ideas, not a failure of policy, but a failure of ego. The parties could agree on what was wrong with the country. They could never agree on who should stand at the front of the room.

THE ANALYST does not pretend to know the private calculations of every leader who sat at that table. We report what is on the record, and the record is discouraging. Even before this latest gathering began, the effort nearly foundered over the most predictable of disputes — the structure of leadership, the identity of the coordinator, the question of who convenes whom. One leader initially declined the invitation precisely because, as he put it, unity cannot begin with predetermined leadership. He was not wrong to insist that partners be treated as equals. But the very fact that such a quarrel can imperil a meeting before it starts tells Liberians everything about the disease that has crippled the opposition for twenty years.

Let us be plain. The ruling establishment has no more reliable ally than a divided opposition. Every failed coalition, every walkout over protocol, every ego bruised by a seating arrangement is a gift to those who would prefer that no credible alternative ever consolidates. When the opposition fractures, it is not the politicians who pay the price. It is the market woman waiting for an economy that works, the young graduate with no job, the family that cannot afford the clinic, and the citizen who watches a drug crisis deepen while the political class quarrels over titles.

This is why the stakes of the current effort reach far beyond the parties themselves. Liberians are not asking their opposition leaders to love one another. They are asking them to behave like adults who share a responsibility to the nation. Collaboration does not require that any leader surrender conviction. It requires only that each surrender the fantasy that he alone is indispensable. A framework negotiated among equals, with transparent rules for decision-making and an honest mechanism for choosing standard-bearers, is not a threat to any serious politician. It is the only route to power that is not purely theoretical.

The steering committee now has a mandate and a deadline, with the parties due to reconvene in two weeks. THE ANALYST will be watching, and so will a public that has learned to expect disappointment. We say to every leader who sat at Jamaica Resort that the country does not need another photograph. It needs a document that can survive contact with your ambitions. It needs a structure strong enough to hold when the presidential question arrives, as it inevitably will, and demanding enough that each of you must give something up.

Democracy is not served by a permanent ruling party facing a permanently broken opposition. It is served by choice — real, organized, credible choice. Liberians have endured too many collapsed alliances to celebrate the mere creation of a committee. But they will celebrate, and they will reward, an opposition mature enough to place the country above the self. That maturity is now the only test that matters. Set aside the egos, and this time, finish what you started.