A writ of arrest. A letter seeking special favor for a distressed ship that turned out not to be so distressed. A name that keeps surfacing in a scandal that has already jailed police commanders and burned $336 million in cocaine. Losing a government job is not the same thing as facing the law, and it is time Liberia stopped treating the two as equivalent.
THERE IS A MOMENT IN EVERY SCANDAL like this one when a single name stops looking like a coincidence and starts looking like a pattern. For Liberia, that moment has arrived, and the name is Mark Egon Kuiah. He does not appear once in this case, in some minor footnote easily explained away. He appears again and again, at nearly every turn that matters -- as if, however this story eventually gets told in full, it will be hard to tell without him in it.
HE WAS NAMED IN THE ORIGINAL WRIT of arrest tied to the cocaine case out of Roberts International Airport, where he served as Deputy Director for Operations, a post that put him inside the very gates the drugs are alleged to have passed through. He was among the officials President Boakai dismissed in late July, in the same sweep that removed two other RIA officials and recalled a fourth. And on July 13 -- weeks before that dismissal, while he still held one of the more sensitive jobs at Liberia's main airport -- he sat down and wrote to the Liberia Maritime Authority, identifying himself as registered agent for a private company, and asked that a supposedly disabled vessel be granted docking privileges and a dive team at the Freeport of Monrovia. LiMA said no, and told this newspaper plainly that the request never added up: the ship hadn't docked anywhere, was still sitting in Sierra Leonean waters, and yet was already asking Liberia for a berth, as though the paperwork were being arranged before the emergency had even finished happening.
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THAT SHIP WAS THE IB ATLANTIC IV. It is the same vessel Liberian troops are now chasing off Rivercess under orders to search and seize it, the same vessel authorities say a smaller boat approached at sea in what looked, to those watching, like an attempt to pass something aboard under cover of open water. Mr. Kuiah has not been charged in connection with that letter, or with anything else. He has, by multiple accounts, been providing investigators with information in recent days, a flurry of cooperation that has come only after his name was already on the writ, only after the dismissal, only after the ship he once vouched for became a national mystery. We take no position here on what that cooperation is worth, or what it will ultimately mean when the full picture comes into focus. But talking to investigators after the fact is not the same thing as facing them in a courtroom, and a dismissal letter is not a verdict. Both allow a man sitting at the center of two of the most serious threads in this scandal to remain, for the moment, simply a private citizen who used to have a government job -- not a suspect, not a defendant, not anyone required to answer for anything under oath.
IT IS WORTH REMEMBERING THAT Liberia has not been shy about arrest and prosecution elsewhere in this same case. Two police commanders were charged with personally escorting cocaine through the streets of the capital in marked cruisers. A police intelligence chief was accused of taking a bribe to protect suspects already sitting in custody. Officials up and down the chain have been named, suspended, marched out of their offices. Against that record, a pattern this direct -- a name on a writ of arrest, a letter seeking special privileges for the exact ship now under suspicion, a desk at the exact airport where the drugs are alleged to have moved through -- cannot be allowed to end quietly at a personnel action, filed away and forgotten.
Discover moreAfricans & DiasporaNewspapersNews IF THE STANDARD APPLIED to a commander in a marked cruiser is handcuffs and a charge sheet, the same standard has to apply to an airport operations official whose own signature sits on a document tied to the ship the government's own troops are chasing down the coast tonight.
WE WANT TO BE CAREFUL HERE, because carefulness is exactly what this newspaper has asked of the government throughout this scandal, and we cannot ask for less of ourselves. We are not a court, and we do not pretend to know today what a full investigation would ultimately prove. Mr. Kuiah is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else named in this case, and nothing in this editorial should be mistaken for a verdict on facts that remain, for now, genuinely unresolved. But a presumption of innocence is a shield against a rush to judgment -- it is not a reason to leave a case this serious parked at the level of an HR decision, quietly, while the man at the center of it keeps talking to investigators on his own terms and on his own schedule.
THE GOVERNMENT HAS THE AUTHORITY to open a formal criminal inquiry into Mr. Kuiah's conduct, to place him under arrest if the evidence supports it, and to let a judge, not a press release from the Executive Mansion, decide what his letter to LiMA actually means. So far, it has chosen the quieter path, and Liberians have noticed.
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This is the part that should trouble every reader following this story.
LIBERIANS HAVE WATCHED THIS government dismiss officials by the dozen this summer, one purge announcement after another, without watching very many of those officials actually walk into a courtroom. That gap -- between being removed from a job and being made to answer for it under the law -- is exactly what has fed the public's creeping suspicion that this scandal will end the way so many before it have: with junior names in handcuffs and senior names simply reassigned, retired, or forgotten.
MARK KUIAH'S NAME HAS SURFACED too many times, in too many separate threads of this case, for the government to let him remain nothing more than a former deputy director with an interesting story to tell investigators. He deserves a formal investigation, an arrest if the facts support one, and a chance to be either charged or cleared in open court, in front of the country that is watching this scandal unfold in real time. Liberians deserve to know which of those outcomes is coming -- and they have waited long enough to be told it will be soon.
