By Alex Prince Johnson
Correspondent, Maryland
Harper, Maryland County, August 12, 2025 – Across Liberia, the Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) is being quietly but decisively evicted—not just from buildings, but from the symbolic architecture of relevance.
What began as a local repossession in Harper has now escalated into a national reckoning, with the Supreme Court ordering the party’s removal from its Monrovia headquarters. The ruling, delivered in May 2025, dismissed CDC’s legal claim as “preposterous” and “impermissible,” affirming that the party had no standing to contest the landlord’s title.
The Harper eviction incident—where unpaid rent led to the transformation of a CDC office into the Pentecost Preparatory School—is no longer an isolated anecdote. It is now part of a judicially sanctioned pattern. In Monrovia, the party’s 4.23-acre headquarters was lost after years of legal wrangling, rental arrears, and failed negotiations. The Supreme Court’s language was unambiguous: CDC’s attempt to delay enforcement was a “legal charade,” and its payments constituted “an implied enforcement” of the original eviction order.
This convergence of grassroots action and judicial authority suggests a deeper shift: the party is being dispossessed not just physically, but morally, politically, and psychologically.
“When a political party loses its claim to a space, it loses its claim to presence,” said Emmanuel Toe, a policy analyst. “The buildings are metaphors. The evictions are verdicts.”
Reports from other counties—Grand Bassa, Sinoe, and parts of Lofa—indicate similar patterns. CDC offices have been shuttered due to unpaid obligations, community discontent, or simple abandonment. In some cases, the buildings have been repurposed into clinics, vocational centers, or informal schools. These transformations are rarely announced, but they are deeply felt.
“We didn’t evict them with force,” said a youth leader in Buchanan. “We just stopped waiting.
The repurposing of CDC spaces or offices reveals a new civic logic: when politics fails, communities improvise. The buildings, once adorned with party banners and campaign slogans, now host chalkboards, sewing machines, and health posters in Harper, Maryland. The shift is not just functional—it’s philosophical.
“We’re not just changing tenants,” said Principal Rebecca Wesseh in Harper. “We’re changing the purpose of the space.”
While Liberia’s CDC faces eviction, Ghana’s political landscape tells a parallel story. Over 50 government health facilities initiated under the Mahama administration were abandoned, prompting civil society to demand their revival.
In Sierra Leone, while no direct party evictions have been reported, the repurposing of public health infrastructure—often with CDC (U.S.) support—reflects a similar dynamic: when institutions falter, communities adapt.
These regional echoes suggest that the phenomenon is not uniquely Liberian. It is West African. It is post-party. It is post-promise.
The optics of a party headquarters becoming a school is striking. But the deeper question is legacy and political base ahead of 2029. What does it mean when a political party’s most enduring contribution is the space it vacated? What does it say when the chalkboard outlasts the manifesto?
In Liberia, the answer is being written daily—by children, by teachers, by communities who refuse to wait.
