Liberia: Cummings Says CPP Collapse Must Not Block Opposition Unity

Published: September 7, 2026

MONROVIA — The collapse of the Collaborating Political Parties should not stop Liberia’s opposition leaders from working together again, Alternative National Congress political leader Alexander B. Cummings said Sunday, clearing away the most cited objection to the new opposition front former President George Manneh Weah began assembling this weekend.

“But the mistakes of the CPP should not stop us from working together,” Cummings said. “And so we’ll just be smarter, wiser about how we do it, but we need to work together as a country, as a people.”

Cummings spoke to journalists a day after Weah brought opposition political leaders together for a roundtable at his Jamaica Resort office in Paynesville, a meeting that reopened the question of whether the opposition can hold a common position before 2029.

Cummings was the CPP’s standard bearer and its central figure when the alliance came apart, and he said those who lived through that failure carry the responsibility for not repeating it.

“Well, I think it’s up to us who are in the CPP, who are victims of that situation, to remember those lessons, and as we get back into collaboration, conversation, we should keep that in mind,” he said.

The CPP was formed by the ANC, the Unity Party, the Liberty Party and the All Liberian Party, and was certified by the National Elections Commission in 2020. It fractured over leadership and over the alliance’s framework document. The All Liberian Party pulled out in December 2021 and the Unity Party followed in February 2022, and the Liberty Party then split into rival factions ahead of the 2023 election.

Cummings ran anyway, with Charlyne Brumskine as his running mate, and finished fifth with 29,613 votes, or 1.61 percent of the valid votes cast in the first round. The CPP endorsed Weah for the runoff, which Cummings did not personally join, and Joseph Nyuma Boakai defeated Weah that November. The alliance was dissolved in 2024.

Cummings said Liberian politics has to abandon what he called a habit of tearing rivals down.

“We gotta stop this crap mentality where we pull each other down. We should be working together to lift up the country. We should wish each other well,” he said.

That extends to the president, Cummings said. “We should wish President Boakai well because if he’s doing well, if the country’s doing well, then hopefully the suffering of our people is going down, and that’s what we should all want,” he said.

“We are in what I call this race. We are racing to the bottom of the barrel, and we should be racing to the top. We should be pushing each other with better ideas, supporting each other so the country can move up,” he said.

Cummings said the opposition should still hold the government to account, but with alternatives attached. “Absolutely. We all should be not just criticizing because we can and should hold the government accountable, but we should also offer solutions,” he said. He said he offers an alternative almost every time he criticizes a government policy, and that the government should adopt opposition recommendations that would benefit the country.

Asked whether he would accept a vice-presidential slot on someone else’s ticket in 2029, Cummings did not rule it out or accept it.

“So, you know, I’ve answered that question in the sense that this is about Liberia, it’s not about me,” he said. He said journalists should put the same question to other political leaders.

Cummings did not say whether the ANC will join whatever emerges from Saturday’s meeting.