By Sherman C. Seequeh
The other day, I sent a note to fellow CDC partisans as they trooped to Zwedru for the party’s 22nd Anniversary and Militant Month Celebration. Now, as the assembly disperses, I offer this piece — carrying the energy of that opening word, the hard truths spoken on the Zwedru platform, and a final charge that goes beyond political principle into the architecture of lasting national change.
Something important was said in Zwedru last Saturday that deserves far more attention than the stampede of ululation that the occasion permitted. Among the several political voices that converged on the CDC’s 22nd Anniversary and Militant Month Celebration in Grand Gedeh County, it was Rep. Musa Hassan Bility of the Citizens Movement for Change who cut through the celebratory atmosphere. He did so with the sharpest, most unvarnished political truth of the day. His message was not comfortable. It was not designed to please the hosts or the crowd. It was the kind of thing Liberian politicians rarely say on borrowed platforms: that opposition unity built on the singular desire to remove a government from power is not unity at all. It is a power grab wearing unity’s clothing. And Liberia, he reminded the gathering with disarming directness, has been down that road before — and has the wounds to prove it.
I submit in this opinion: Bility is not merely right — he is saying what every serious Liberian political observer has known for years but has been too polite, too partisan, or too invested in the next election cycle to say aloud. The opposition must hear him. And more than hear him — they must act on him.
THE GRAVEYARD OF LIBERIAN OPPOSITION COALITIONS
Let the record speak. The Collaborating Political Parties — the CPP — was Liberia’s most ambitious opposition coalition in recent memory. It brought together the Unity Party, the Alternative National Congress, the Liberty Party, and the All Liberian Party under one electoral umbrella. It was celebrated as a masterstroke of opposition consolidation. International observers praised it. Diaspora Liberians funded it. The grassroots embraced it with genuine hope.
And then it collapsed — spectacularly, bitterly, publicly — from the inside. By February 2022, the Unity Party had withdrawn. By March, a major faction of the Liberty Party had followed. Accusations of document tampering, leadership manipulation, and personal ambition masquerading as principle flew in every direction. The CPP did not die because its enemies destroyed it. It died because its architects never agreed on anything beyond the shared desire to defeat George Weah. When that glue proved insufficient to hold divergent ambitions together, the structure collapsed under its own contradictions.
This is precisely what Bility named in Zwedru. Not as historical trivia, but as a living warning. The CPP’s autopsy is the manual for what the next opposition coalition must never repeat. And the central lesson is brutally simple: you cannot build a durable political alliance on the negative energy of removal. Removal is a campaign. Governance is a lifetime. If the parties cannot agree on how to govern before they agree to contest together, they are not building a coalition — they are scheduling their next public divorce.
WHAT A GUIDING PRINCIPLE ACTUALLY MEANS
Bility used the phrase “guiding principle” repeatedly in Zwedru, and it is worth unpacking precisely what that means in the Liberian political context — because it is not a vague philosophical aspiration. It is a concrete, operational demand.
A guiding principle for an opposition coalition means this: before the first joint press conference, before the first shared campaign rally, before any memorandum of understanding is signed, the constituent parties must sit down and produce a written, binding, publicly available national agenda document that answers the following questions with specificity and without ambiguity. What is the economic philosophy of the coalition government — and which party’s framework prevails where they conflict? How will cabinet positions be allocated, on what criteria, and who holds veto power over appointments that fall below agreed competence thresholds? What is the legislative agenda for the first one hundred days, the first year, and the first term? What accountability mechanisms will govern the coalition partners themselves, so that one party cannot unilaterally undermine the agreed agenda for partisan gain? And critically — what happens when a coalition partner breaches the agreement? What are the consequences, the remedies, and the exit procedures?
These are not bureaucratic niceties. They are the architecture of governance. Without them, any coalition that takes power in 2029 will begin fracturing the morning after inauguration — exactly as previous alliances have — because the partners will have no agreed map for the territory they have jointly captured. Power without a map produces exactly what Liberians have repeatedly suffered: improvised governance, partisan cabinet warfare, public resources consumed by internal coalition management rather than national development, and a citizenry left holding the wreckage of yet another promise.
GROUND RULES MUST PRECEDE GROUND CAMPAIGNS
Bility made a point in Zwedru that went beyond the question of principles into the equally critical question of personnel. He asked — with genuine force — who will represent Grand Gedeh? Who will represent Maryland? Who will be the senator or representative with the backbone to tell a president that his appointee is unqualified and must be sent back? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the operational test of whether an opposition coalition is serious about governance or merely serious about winning.
I humbly submit that any emergent opposition collaboration must therefore establish, as a non-negotiable precondition, a set of binding ground rules that govern not only the presidential ticket but the entire legislative slate. The ground rules must specify that candidates for the House and Senate under the coalition banner are vetted against agreed competence criteria — not selected on the basis of party quota, ethnic balance, or personal loyalty to a standard bearer. They must specify that the coalition’s legislative members are bound to a shared legislative agenda and cannot be co-opted individually by executive patronage once in office. And they must specify that a coalition oversight body — with representation from civil society and not just party officials — exists to monitor adherence to the agreed national agenda throughout the life of the government.
Without these ground rules, the campaign will be a unity show and the government will be a partition war. Liberians have watched that film too many times. They know how it ends.
THE NATIONAL TRANSFORMATION AGENDA MUST COME FIRST
At the heart of Bility’s argument is something even deeper than coalition mechanics. It is the demand that Liberia’s opposition define, before anything else, what kind of country they are trying to build. Not what kind of government they want to form. Not which standard bearer they want to elevate. But what kind of country — with what economic structure, what quality of public institutions, what relationship between the state and the citizen, what vision for the next generation of Liberians.
We have long argued that Liberia’s fundamental political problem is not a deficit of opposition parties. It is a deficit of opposition ideas. The country has plenty of parties and plenty of standard bearers. What it has never had is a coherent, pre-tested, publicly debated national transformation agenda that a coalition of parties has collectively authored, individually endorsed, and jointly staked their political futures on delivering. Such a document — call it a National Transformation Compact — would do three things simultaneously. It would give the coalition a governing map. It would give the electorate a performance benchmark against which to hold the eventual government accountable. And it would give the constituent parties a shared identity that transcends the personality of whichever standard bearer emerges as the coalition’s presidential candidate.
As Bility correctly put it in Zwedru — it does not matter whether the coalition coalesces around the CDC’s ideas, or Cummings’ ideas, or the CMC’s ideas, or the MPC’s ideas, or a synthesis of all of them. What matters is that the ideas come first and the coalition structure comes second. Reverse that order — as every previous Liberian opposition alliance has done — and you get what every previous Liberian opposition alliance has produced: a coalition that wins or loses together but cannot govern together.
THE ONUS IS NOW ON THE CDC — AND ON ALL OF THEM
Bility closed his Zwedru remarks by placing the burden squarely on the CDC. “Today, CDC, you are the driver of the opposition,” he said. “The onus is on you.” It was a generous and candid acknowledgment from the leader of a newer, smaller party to the largest opposition force in the country. And it was a challenge as much as a compliment. The CDC, as the party that came within 20,573 votes of the presidency in 2023, that holds the largest opposition base in the country, and that convened this gathering — the CDC bears the primary responsibility for what opposition unity looks like going into 2029.
But the onus does not rest on the CDC alone. It rests equally on Cummings, whose ANC has built a reform-oriented brand that must now be tested against the discipline of genuine coalition participation rather than independent positioning. It rests on Urey, whose resources and networks could either stabilize or distort a coalition depending on how transparently his party engages the process. It rests on Freeman, whose sharp economic critique must eventually translate from speech into policy architecture if the MPC is to be a serious governing partner rather than a permanent protest movement. And it rests on Ja’neh, whose legal and institutional credibility could anchor the coalition’s constitutional integrity if he chooses to play that role with the full weight of his experience.
What Zwedru produced last Saturday was a moment — a rare, genuinely multi-party moment of political honesty in a country not accustomed to its politicians telling hard truths in public.
Whether that moment becomes a movement depends entirely on whether the leaders who shared that platform in Grand Gedeh return to Monrovia and do the hard, unglamorous, non-photogenic work of actually drafting the guiding principles, the ground rules, and the national transformation agenda that Bility demanded.
A POLITICAL COMPACT IS NOT ENOUGH — IT MUST BECOME LAW
But this writer wants to go one critical step further than what was said in Zwedru — because a political compact, however well-crafted, is still a piece of paper. And pieces of paper have a well-documented life expectancy in Liberian political history. They survive the campaign. They survive the inauguration. They survive perhaps the first cabinet sitting. And then, quietly, incrementally, they are set aside — superseded by the daily pressures of governance, the competing ambitions of coalition partners, the seductions of incumbency, and the age-old Liberian political habit of treating national development as a personal discretion rather than a public obligation.
The coalition that emerges from the conversations begun in Zwedru must break that cycle permanently. And the only way to break it permanently is to do something no Liberian opposition coalition has ever done: use the power of the legislature to elevate the national development agenda from a political document into a legislated national blueprint — a law of the land that no future administration can arbitrarily set aside, no future standard bearer can truncate for partisan reasons, and no change of power can simply erase.
The opposition today holds significant numbers in both chambers of the National Legislature. Those numbers represent not merely a blocking force against the Boakai administration — they represent a constitutional instrument for shaping the future. If the CDC, the ANC, the CMC, the MPC, the ALP and their allies were to sit down, hammer out a National Development Compact that reflects their shared vision for transforming Liberia, and then introduce that compact as legislation — debated, amended, passed, and signed into law — they would accomplish something of historic and generational significance. They would insulate Liberia’s development trajectory from the arbitrary changes of administrations. They would protect long-term infrastructure programmes, education investments, agricultural development frameworks, and institutional reform agendas from being truncated every six years when power changes hands. They would give the Liberian people, for the first time in the Republic’s modern history, a development plan that belongs to the nation and not to whichever party happens to occupy the Executive Mansion.
This is not a novel idea in the world. Countries that have achieved sustained development — from Botswana to Rwanda to Malaysia — have done so in significant part because their development frameworks transcended electoral cycles. They built institutions, not just administrations. They passed laws, not just policies. They made national development a legal obligation of the state, not a campaign promise of the incumbent. Liberia can do this. The opposition has the numbers to start it. Zwedru was the conversation. Monrovia must be the legislation.
THE PARTING CHARGE
The Liberian people are not asking for another opposition coalition. They have seen enough of those. What they are asking for — what they have always been asking for, with every vote they have cast and every government they have endured — is a coalition that knows what it is for, not just what it is against. A coalition that comes to power with a plan, not just a promise. A coalition that has already decided, before it asks for a single vote, what kind of Liberia it intends to leave behind.
So to my fellow partisans now heading home from Zukuwisky — carry this thought with you. The anniversary is over. The speeches are done. The music has stopped. What remains is the work. And the work is not the next rally. The work is the drafting table, the legislative chamber, the committee room, the long and unglamorous process of turning the vision that was spoken in Grand Gedeh into the law of the land that no future president, no future coalition, and no future political season can simply set aside.
Rep. Bility said it plainly in Zukuwisky. The question now is whether his colleagues were listening — or merely applauding. Go well. Work harder. Legislate the future.
