By Sallia S. Komala
Dear Hon. Bility
My name is Sallia S. Komala. I come from Sarkonedu, Quadu-Gboni District, Lofa County. I am a 2024 graduate of Cuttington University. I grew up watching Liberia struggle against itself, and I have spent enough years close to its people and institutions to know the difference between a country that is trying to change and one that is performing change for the cameras.
I write to you because you have stepped into a dangerous space. Anyone who tries to break the CDC and UP duopoly in Liberia is either a visionary or a fool, and the difference between the two is not intention. It is preparation. You have announced yourself. What follows this letter is a question of whether the announcement holds.
I am not here to applaud you. I am here to ask you hard questions. If you can answer them with honesty and with a plan, then the Citizen Movement for Change deserves to be taken seriously. If you cannot, then it will join the long list of political projects that offered the people hope and delivered them exhaustion.
The first question is about the kind of leader you intend to be.
Nelson Mandela once observed that a good leader can engage a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. That sentence describes a leader who seeks to build, not to dominate. Liberia has had enough leaders who sought to dominate. We have the graveyards to prove it.
Do you want to be the man who unseats the CDC and UP, or do you want to be the man who finally makes Liberia governable? Those are not the same ambition. One is about power. The other is about service. The Liberian people have been promised the first enough times to know that it usually ends badly for them. What they are waiting for, though most would not say it in these words, is someone who has genuinely chosen the second.
The question is not rhetorical. It requires a public answer, not a slogan. What does dignity look like for the woman in Clara Town who defecates in the open because no government in her lifetime has built sanitation near her home? What does it look like for the child in West Point who goes to a school with no books and comes home to a community with no electricity? Your movement must be able to answer that question with specifics, not with promises.
The second question is about the economy.
Liberia’s problem is not its people. Liberians are not poor by genetic defect or cultural failure. Liberia is poor because of how it has been governed. The postwar economic agenda in Liberia has been built almost entirely on neoliberal prescriptions from international financial institutions: privatize, liberalize, attract foreign investment, and trust the market. That formula has produced consistent GDP growth numbers and consistent mass misery at the same time. Growth without distribution is arithmetic, not development.
The deeper problem is that those neoliberal prescriptions were handed to a state that was already incompetent, already captured by patronage networks, and already incapable of enforcing the regulatory frameworks that make markets work. You cannot run a neoliberal economy without a functional state. Liberia tried. The result is what we have.
Your party must engage this honestly. Not with the language of ideology, but with the language of governance. What set of economic policies will your movement champion that are different from what the CDC and the UP have offered? What is your view on how Liberia should manage its natural resources? On how it should build the infrastructure that makes a productive economy possible? On how it should tax wealth and invest the proceeds in the people who generate it? The debate needs big ideas. Liberia deserves big ideas. What are yours?
The third question is about institutions, and it is the most important question of all.
A nation’s character is not revealed by its flag or its anthem. It is revealed by whether its institutions work for the people or against them. Liberia’s institutions have been working against the people for a long time, and the evidence is not abstract.
In 2018, Associate Justice Kabineh Jan’eh was impeached. The proceedings raised serious questions about whether the constitutional framework governing the relationship between the executive and the judiciary was functioning as designed or as weaponized. In 2024, the removal of Speaker Jonathan Fonati Koffa exposed the same fracture lines. Most recently, the so-called impeachment involving Honorable Yekeh Kolubah, Montserrado County Electoral District #10 Representative, showed again that the Supreme Court’s authority is contested, politicized, and vulnerable. These are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern. The pattern is that institutions in Liberia exist to serve whoever holds power, not to constrain power in the interests of the governed.
Vote buying is not a marginal problem. It is the primary mechanism through which Liberian politics operates. The National Elections Commission tracks campaign financing with the tools of an institution that was never designed to succeed at that task. The judiciary delivers verdicts that the politically connected have already negotiated. These are not accusations. They are the lived experience of millions of Liberians who have stopped believing that the system can deliver justice for them.
Do you believe the current constitutional arrangements around these institutions are adequate? Or do you believe that structural constitutional reform is required? If reform is required, what does it look like, who designs it, and how does it get done without being captured by the same interests that benefit from the current arrangement?
The fourth question is about state-owned enterprises and statistical independence, and it is where your movement has the greatest opportunity to be genuinely different.
The SOEs in Liberia have been treated as reward systems for party loyalists who did not receive a ministerial appointment or a legislative seat. That is not an accusation. It is a documented practice across administrations, across parties, and across decades. The result is that institutions designed to be drivers of economic growth and state revenue have become liabilities. They consume public resources, produce poor services, and serve as a political safety valve rather than an economic engine.
Your movement can propose something concrete here. Countries have solved this problem through constitutional and statutory arrangements that remove presidential appointment power from SOE leadership and replace it with merit-based competitive processes. Finland, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, and France use independent ownership agencies or holding companies where professional boards hold the legal power to appoint and dismiss CEOs, with no presidential discretion. Kenya uses an independent Judicial Service Commission to nominate superior court judges through public merit-based interviews, with the president legally bound to appoint the Commission’s nominee. Countries like Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand protect statistical independence by making the head of the national statistics office subject to professional appointment processes that insulate the position from political interference.
These are not foreign experiments. They are proven models. LISGIS in Liberia, which produces the data on which every serious development conversation depends, cannot perform its function credibly if its leadership is subject to presidential appointment and dismissal. The integrity of Liberia’s economic data is a national security issue. Your movement can lead a serious conversation about what genuine institutional independence looks like for SOEs, for LISGIS, and for the judiciary. That conversation is long overdue. It will also distinguish you clearly from every other political actor in the country, because none of them wants to have it.
I want to say something about human capital, because the way this term is used in Liberian political discourse causes real harm.
Human capital in Liberia is routinely defined as people with formal education. This definition excludes the farmers of Lofa County who know the land better than any agronomist. It excludes the bike riders of Monrovia who navigate a city that has never been adequately mapped. It excludes the market women of Waterside who manage credit, inventory, and customer relationships with no formal training and remarkable skill. It excludes the carpenters, the masons, the fishermen, and the disabled community whose knowledge and labour hold the informal economy together.
Your party’s mobilization must be built around the full human capital of Liberia. Not for transactional purposes. Not to put bodies at rallies and distribute t-shirts before elections. The farmers, the bike riders, the marketeers, the teachers, the students, the disabled community: these must be the engine of your ground forces, not the audience for your speeches. If your party cannot speak to and with them, it cannot govern for them.
On youth: most political parties in Liberia use young people as serial callers, sycophants, and violent peddlers. They extract the energy of youth and return nothing except the temporary excitement of proximity to power. Your party must break that pattern or it will reproduce the same damage.
China, Singapore, and several social democratic parties in Europe have built party schools that exist specifically to educate members in ideology, governance, history, and policy. The goal is continuity and capacity. A thinking class, not an insulting class. Your party should establish schools of this kind: institutions that teach Liberian history, African political thought, development economics, and the philosophy of governance. Young people who pass through those schools become assets to the movement and eventually to the country. Young people who are given phones and talking points become a liability.
Integrate young people into serious decision-making roles. Not as tokens or as a youth wing that operates in a separate room while the real decisions happen elsewhere. Real integration, with real authority and real accountability.
Let me say one final thing about the duopoly you are trying to break.
The CDC and UP entrenched duopoly is not primarily a policy disagreement. The two parties do not have meaningful policy differences. They disagree about who controls the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Both are neoliberal establishments. Both rely on patronage. Both treat the state as a resource to be distributed among supporters. The duopoly is sustained not by the strength of the ideas it represents but by the weakness of the alternatives that have been offered.
Do not live in denial about how entrenched that duopoly is. Build your movement around big ideas that genuinely challenge the system. Put people-centered institutional processes in place that can outlast your own leadership. A movement that depends on one person’s charisma is not a movement. It is a personality. Personalities end. Institutions endure.
Liberia needs forces of ideas. Disciplined enough to replace patronage with institutions. Serious enough to replace slogans with structure. Honest enough to replace power-seeking with the patient, difficult work of building a country where every Liberian can live with dignity.
I am available and open for a deeper conversation on any of the questions raised here. I raise them not to challenge you for its own sake, but because I believe the Liberian people deserve a political movement that has wrestled with hard questions before it asks them to follow.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
Regards,
Sallia S. Komala
2024 Graduate, Cuttington University
Sarkonedu, Quadu-Gboni District, Lofa County, Liberia
komalasallias@gmail.com / +231775278175
