Monrovia – To understand why Mark Kuiah’s name keeps surfacing, it helps to understand what his job was. As Deputy Managing Director for Operations at the Liberia Airport Authority, Kuiah sat inside the operational chain of the one facility every serious trafficking route through Liberia’s airspace must pass through. It was not his first posting at Roberts International Airport, either.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
By multiple accounts, Kuiah’s career at RIA stretches back to the presidency of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, when he served as Procurement Manager, before advancing to Special Projects Manager under President George Weah and eventually to the Deputy Managing Director post under President Boakai — a two-decade arc that placed him inside airport operations across three separate administrations. Sources allege that his involvement in narcotics trafficking extends back to that earlier period as well, describing operations they say reached “in all directions” under the Sirleaf government. This newspaper has not independently verified claims about Kuiah’s conduct predating the current investigation, and they are reported here as allegations, not established fact.
Named in the Writ
Kuiah’s name first became public in this scandal the way most names in this case have: attached to a writ of arrest. As the investigation into the record cocaine seizure at Roberts International Airport widened in June and July, his name appeared among those tied to the case, placing him — while still an active, sitting deputy director — inside a probe that would go on to touch police commanders, an intelligence chief, airport workers and, eventually, a sitting inspector general’s own credibility.
The Letter
What makes Kuiah’s case different from most of the other names swept into this scandal is that his most serious exposure did not come from something investigators found. It came from something he wrote. On July 13, weeks before his dismissal, Kuiah sent a letter to the Liberia Maritime Authority, identifying himself as registered agent for a company called Madris Group of Companies Incorporated, requesting that a vessel he described as being in distress be granted special docking privileges and a dive team at the Freeport of Monrovia. “We wish to notify you that the said vessel is in distress at sea due to loss of engine performance… external obstruction affecting the vessel’s propeller,” the letter read.
LiMA said no — and told this newspaper the request never made sense in the first place. “The fact of the matter is, we didn’t grant any clearance — especially at the time when the vessel was in Sierra Leone… How could it be in distress?” a LiMA official said. The ship in that letter was the IB Atlantic IV — the same vessel that, weeks later, would become the subject of a government order to search and seize it, and the target of an AFL operation its own chief of staff has described as a “hot pursuit.” Authorities have also investigated reports that a smaller vessel approached the ship at sea and attempted to pass something aboard, a detail that has only deepened suspicion around the ship Kuiah once vouched for.
The Dismissal
Kuiah’s position finally caught up with him in late July, when President Boakai dismissed him along with three other officials — Johnny Bolar Dean, Patrick Doe, and Patrick Komasu — in a sweep that touched five government agencies at once. The Executive Mansion framed the move as evidence the government would not let rank shield anyone from accountability. For Kuiah, it meant the end of a job that had put him at the center of two of the most serious threads in this entire scandal: a writ of arrest, and a letter tied to a ship now under suspicion of smuggling.
An Exit Almost Made
According to sources describing the days before Kuiah’s dismissal, he had inserted himself into an upcoming foreign medical conference that had nothing to do with his own role — a trip organized for nurses assigned to the RIA Fire Department. Sources allege Kuiah arranged to take a seat meant for one of those nurses, effectively sidelining her from a trip she would ordinarily have attended, and that LAA Managing Director Ernest R. Hughes was aware of the arrangement. The suggestion, as sources describe it, is that the trip offered Kuiah a way to leave Liberia under the cover of official travel just as the investigation was closing in around him — and that, had President Boakai not moved to dismiss him when he did, Kuiah might have left the country before facing any further scrutiny at all, in the manner sources say other officials have managed to do in past cases. This newspaper has not confirmed the existence or itinerary of the conference in question, nor obtained comment from Hughes or Kuiah, and reports the allegation here for the record while noting its single-source nature.
Talking, Not Charged
What has followed Kuiah’s dismissal is, in its own way, as notable as anything that came before it. He has not been charged in connection with the letter to LiMA, the writ of arrest, or any other aspect of the case. He has, by multiple accounts, been providing investigators with a considerable amount of information in recent days — cooperation that stands in visible contrast to the path taken this week by LDEA officer Moses Jallah and businessman George “Leroy” Harris, both of whom now face formal prosecution in a related strand of the same scandal. Whether Kuiah’s cooperation reflects genuine assistance to the investigation, an effort to get ahead of it, or something else entirely is not something this newspaper can determine from the outside. What is measurable is the gap itself: a dismissal letter for Kuiah, a charge sheet for others accused of far less direct entanglement in the case.
That gap has not gone unnoticed. Critics of the government’s handling of the case have argued that a dismissal is not accountability, and that the volume and seriousness of the threads connecting Kuiah to this scandal — a name in a writ of arrest, a letter tied to a suspect vessel, and now allegations of an attempted departure from the country itself — cannot be allowed to end with him simply out of a job. Kuiah is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else named in this case, and nothing reported here should be read as a verdict on facts that remain, in significant part, unresolved. But as Liberia’s cocaine scandal produces its first courtroom defendants in Jallah and Harris, the question of where Mark Kuiah fits in that same reckoning is one the government has yet to answer.
