WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF YEKEH KOLUBAH RETURNING TO THE LEGISLATURE?
The Constitution may be on his side. Liberia’s politics rarely are. Three months after the House expelled him in a vote it took anyway, in defiance of a Supreme Court stay order, the fight over whether Yekeh Kolubah gets his seat back has become a test of whether Liberia’s founding document means what it says — or only what the powerful decide it says on a given day.
By Rodney D. Sieh | rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
MONROVIA — When members of Liberia’s House of Representatives voted on April 17 to expel Montserrado District #10 lawmaker Yekeh Kolubah, securing the constitutionally required two-thirds majority with 49 signatures, it capped one of the more chaotic episodes in the Legislature’s recent history. It also left behind a mess the courts are still working through.
The vote went ahead despite a stay order from the Supreme Court. Associate Justice Yussif D. Kaba, sitting in chambers, had directed House leadership the day before to halt all further action pending a judicial conference. House leadership pushed forward anyway, arguing the writ of prohibition had never been properly served on the one official authorized to receive it — the Sergeant-at-Arms. In May, Justice Kaba agreed with them on that narrow procedural point, dismissing Kolubah’s challenge without ruling on the underlying constitutionality of the expulsion itself. Kolubah’s legal team has appealed to the Supreme Court’s full bench. The case is not resolved. It is, for now, in limbo — and so, in a sense, is Kolubah’s political future.
The Accusation
At the center of it all is a single, incendiary set of remarks. Returning from a trip in March, amid rising tension over the long-contested Liberia-Guinea border, Kolubah said publicly that disputed territory near the Sorlumba checkpoint belonged to Guinea, and suggested Guinean authorities should “take their land.” Colleagues called it reckless, a threat to national sovereignty, and grounds for removal.
Montserrado District #3 Representative Sumo K. Mulbah filed the complaint that started the process, accusing Kolubah of gross misconduct, violation of his oath of office, breach of House rules, and conduct bringing the Legislature into disrepute. Liberia’s police inspector general separately flagged the remarks as a possible national security concern. The House’s Committee on Rules, Order and Administration took up the case, and within weeks, more than three dozen lawmakers had signed on to remove him.
Not everyone in the House was comfortable with how fast it moved. Nimba County Representative Musa Hassan Bility, of the Citizens Movement for Change, called the expulsion effort a calculated political maneuver and warned publicly that Liberia was entering a dangerous phase in its democratic life. He wasn’t the only one. At least one colleague argued Kolubah deserved to be heard before being pushed out, and pointed to Guinean troop movements along the Makona River as the more urgent story the House was ignoring.
The criticism reached well beyond the House floor. Former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, appearing on Truth FM’s Truth Breakfast Show days after the vote, said she did not believe a lawmaker should lose his seat over speech, however controversial. “I don’t think this is the way to go. I don’t think someone should be expelled because of freedom of speech,” she said, adding that there were less severe ways to address the concern. “Freedom of speech is something that we must respect. That’s what makes good governance.” Her comments put Liberia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning former head of state on the same side of the issue as opposition figures like Alexander Cummings and lawyer Tiawan Saye Gongloe — an alignment that gave the “free speech” framing of Kolubah’s case a credibility it might otherwise have lacked.
None of it stopped the vote.
What the Constitution Actually Says
Here is where the story turns from political theater to constitutional puzzle — and where a small but determined movement sees its opening.
Article 38 of Liberia’s 1986 Constitution gives each chamber of the Legislature the power to expel a member “for cause,” with the support of two-thirds of the full membership. That’s what happened to Kolubah. But Article 38 says nothing about barring an expelled member from running again. Article 37 requires the National Elections Commission to hold a by-election within 90 days of a vacancy — whether that vacancy comes from death, resignation, expulsion “or otherwise” — and again, it places no restriction on who may stand. The only qualifications for the office appear in Article 30: candidates must be at least 25 years old, have lived in the constituency for at least a year before the election, and be a taxpayer. The Supreme Court has previously held that this list is exclusive — that no other body can add to it without amending the Constitution itself.
Strip away the politics, and the legal reading is straightforward: an expelled representative can run in the by-election for his own former seat, provided he still meets Article 30’s three requirements and isn’t disqualified by some other law — a criminal conviction, for instance. Nothing in the Constitution says expulsion carries a ban on re-election.
The Movement to Bring Him Back
That reading is the entire foundation of a new campaign, led by political strategist Emmanuel Yartoe, calling itself Citizens United to Re-elect Yekeh.
Yartoe says he had stepped back from campaign work in Liberia, unwilling to attach himself to another candidate without vetting them thoroughly first. Kolubah changed his mind. “Yekeh Kolubah embodies many of the values that Liberia desperately needs in public service: courage, persistence, and a willingness to confront injustice, regardless of the consequences,” Yartoe said, adding that he has come to believe shared values matter more than shared interests.
He’s unbothered by Kolubah’s reputation for bluntness bordering on recklessness — the same trait that got him expelled in the first place. “Yekeh frequently says publicly what many Liberians discuss privately but are unwilling to express openly,” Yartoe said, arguing that outspokenness, however messy, beats “the silence that often accompanies corruption and the theft of Liberian children’s future.”
For Yartoe, the coming fight isn’t really about Kolubah at all. “If the Constitution permits Yekeh Kolubah to contest the election, then no political authority should attempt to deny the Liberian people the opportunity to choose,” he said. “The Constitution must be applied as written, not according to political convenience.” In his framing, any by-election in District #10 becomes a referendum on whether Liberia’s founding document is a living rulebook or a negotiable one.
So, What Are the Odds?
On paper, decent. The constitutional text is genuinely on Kolubah’s side, and Liberia’s courts have historically been reluctant to let other institutions read restrictions into Article 30’s short, closed list of qualifications. If the Supreme Court’s full bench eventually rules on the merits and finds the expulsion procedurally flawed — as opposed to dismissing the case again on service technicalities — Kolubah could be reinstated outright, sidestepping a by-election entirely.
In practice, the odds get murkier. Kolubah’s own conduct since his expulsion hasn’t made the path easier: he has led street demonstrations against President Boakai in Grand Bassa, made a widely noted trip to Guinea that set off public speculation — and some alarm — about his intentions, and signaled interest in a run for the presidency itself in 2029. Each move plays well with a base that already sees him as a truth-teller too dangerous for the establishment to tolerate. Each also hands his opponents fresh material to argue that his expulsion, however procedurally messy, reflected a real judgment about his fitness for office — not just a political hit job.
And the numbers behind his removal complicate the “witch hunt” narrative Kolubah and his allies favor. Independent reporting has found that at least 18 of the 49 lawmakers who signed his expulsion came from opposition parties — the very political camp Kolubah aligned himself with after breaking from the ruling Unity Party he had once campaigned to install in power. That is not the profile of a purely partisan takedown. It suggests Kolubah has, over time, worn out his welcome across more of the political spectrum than his supporters acknowledge.
Whether he returns by court order, by ballot, or not at all, the case has already done what Yartoe says he wants: forced Liberia to ask, in public, what its Constitution actually requires when politics and law collide. The answer to that question will outlast Kolubah’s own political career, however it ends.
